Seasons Greetings to everyone
Here is the first article for 2010.

Should you have an email link on a web page? The short answer is no - have a contact form instead.

You may wonder why complicate things - surely an email link which when clicked on opens the user's email program, is much quicker and more user friendly.

It may be quicker but what about people who don't have access to their email program? Perhaps they are at work and don't want to use their work's email address, or they're using someone else's computer. They could even be in a library or internet cafe.

Maybe you would like to control the information people send to you - for example someone may send you an email asking for something to be sent by post or asking you to phone them, trouble is they have forgotten to give you their address and phone number! You have to email them back asking for additional details.

There is another major problem - the spambot. Spammers send out little programs called spambots, that trawl the web looking for email addresses. These are then collected for the spammers so they can send you lots of lovely junk email.

Enter the Contact Form - there is no email program required by the user - the information they enter in the contact form is sent directly from the web page to your email address.
You can have boxes that they must fill in before the information is sent, such as their address and phone numberand any other necessary information.
There is no email address for the spambots to pick up - although they may try to fill in the contact form but safe guards can be implemented by your web designer to curb this.

The problem of receiving junk email is still not quite solved because the more you publish or use your email address the more likely a spammer will get hold of it, but with a contact form, at least you know they cannot get hold of it from your website.