Tuesday

Still Using Outdated Mailing Methods?

Looking back about ten years or so it was generally pretty rare to find someone who had their own website. But these days it’s nearly impossible to talk to someone who doesn’t have their own website or blog. Typically when I’m having a discussion with other web developers or bloggers we often talk about how to increase website traffic, or about how to increase website ranking. But not many people that I have spoken to mention anything about how their visitors friend them. Making sure that you make a simple and clean line of communication available for your visitors as a publisher must be a priority during site enhancement. Not making yourself available to the people that visit your site in any capacity could cost you a visitor that may return again in the future if you had or worse; you could miss out on a potential customer and the chance to earn some money. If your site doesn’t currently have a means of communication so that visitors can friend you it’s not too late to start a mailing benefit through your site.

Most websites that I see either list a friend email or use the simple mailto: function. Both methods are acceptable ways to make yourself available to visitors, but both are pretty outdated; and it could reflect poorly on your site. Just listing an email address looks very sloppy, and on top of that the user needs to go through the hassle of logging into their email benefit, then copy and pasting your email. The mailto: html function is annoying in my opinion and requires that a default mailing program is setup such as outlook. Don’t quote me on this, but it if I was a betting man I’d feel pretty confident in saying that more people do not use outlook than do. So if listing your email and mailto: are not excellent to use what do I propose as an alternative means of communication?

The Answer: A server side webmail system that’s hosted on your site.

If you are unfamiliar and it sounds complicated, and like it’s vacant to be a huge project don’t worry because it’s really simple to setup. As long as your webserver supports PHP (most web hosting services support PHP today) you will be excellent to go. The script is simple enough to write and here are many tutorials available on the internet and YouTube that can show you how to set this up. But what this does is allow visitors to fill out their information in a form on your site and mails you their information right from the website. In view of the fact that the information is life sent right from the site, users are not inconvenienced by needing to sign into to their personal email services.

Overall, implementing a benefit like this is simple to setup, convenient for visitors to use, and reflects positively on your site. This was just a basic discussion of website mailing implementation, but hopefully it’s been helpful and bring your site one step closer to google page one.