7. “Mailto” Links
Let’s face it: The reason you want people to visit your website is so that they will:
- Visit you.
- Call you.
- E-mail you.
Obviously, a personal visit is most desirable. It shows a high level of commitment on the part of the customer and has the greatest likelihood of resulting in a sale. If a personal visit isn’t in the cards, a phone call will at least give you the option to interact with the customer in real time, and can also lead to sales.
If you can’t motivate a customer to visit or call you, then — at the very least — you want him to send you an e-mail. This is vastly more desirable than the customer not contacting you at all, as it leaves the door open for follow up on your part.
There are a number of ways your website can facilitate the process of customers sending you e-mails. Some, such as e-mail forms, are convenient and effective, with many benefits and few drawbacks. At least one method, however, is something you will want to avoid. That is to make use of Mailto: links.
What is a Mailto: link? You’ve no doubt used them — even if you did not know what their official name was.
A Mailto: link is a hyperlink that, when clicked, automatically opens the user’s e-mail program (such as Microsoft Outlook) and creates a new, blank e-mail message addressed to you or your store.
This sounds convenient enough. So what is the problem? Actually, there are two.
- If a user clicks on a link labeled Contact Us, they will likely expect to go to a page with information on how they can do just that. If, instead, they discover that their web-browsing experience suddenly comes to a halt, while their e-mail program launches and takes over their screen, they may be understandably upset.
- For a Mailto: link to work, it must be encoded with you or your store’s actual e-mail address. Even if you can’t see the address on the web page, it is nevertheless “out there” where it can be mined by automated web-crawling programs called spiders. Now you know why you get so much spam.
Fixing the Problem
The better alternative to Mailto: links is an e-mail form, such as the one shown here:
Forms such as this enable visitors to send e-mail directly from your website, without having to open their e-mail program to do so. Additionally, in so far as your e-mail address never appears in the page’s underlying HTML code, it can’t be mined by unwanted spiders.
E-mail forms are not always spam-proof. Depending on the complexity of the programming underlying the forms, they can range from spam-resistant to nearly unbreakable. Either way, you get a lot less spam than you would relying on Mailto: links.
E-mail forms have other potential benefits:
- When e-mails come from your website form, you know that the sender has visited your website, and did not get your e-mail address from a business card or print ad.
- The form can gather other valuable data for you, such as how the sender found his or her way to your website.
Despite the benefits of e-mail forms, some visitors will prefer sending you messages from their normal e-mail program. There may be any of a number of reasons for this, such as users who want to keep a copy of what they sent on their computer. To accommodate these customers, the e-mail form shown above also displays the store’s e-mail address.
It’s important to note, however, that this is actually a GIF (picture) image and not text. Thus it is much harder for spiders to mine.
Switching to an e-mail form may be of limited value if your store’s e-mail address has been circulating among spammers for months or years. Nevertheless, it can’t hurt and may benefit you in other ways.
…Because People Don’t Like Surprises
If you are intent on creating amateur-looking, hard-to-use websites, the good news is that there are no Web Police to stop you. Nevertheless, people who use the web quickly develop expectations as to how things are “supposed” to work, based on widely used standards of practice.
Among these expectations is that, when you click on a hyperlink, you will go to yet another web page. This is one of the reasons Mailto: links are a bad idea. A Mailto: link that is labeled something like Contact Us creates the expectation users will be taken to a Contact Us web page. If, instead, something unexpected happens (such as the launching of their e-mail program) users may become frustrated and, possibly, leave.
There is a similar pitfall you want to avoid. That is, hyperlinks that (without warning) take users to PDF documents.
You’ve most likely experienced this. You see a link entitled More Trip Details. You click on the link, expecting to see another web page. What happens, instead, is that you get the Adobe “Black Screen of Death” for several seconds while Acrobat loads, the document downloads and you can finally see it.
This is bad for two reasons:
- Again, the hyperlink suggested that it would take you to a More Trip Details web page but, instead, something unexpected happened.
- If the information you were after was sufficiently important to put in a PDF, it should be available first as a web page. (While PDFs are easier to read in print, web pages are generally easier to read on screen.)
Having downloadable PDFs with information on classes, trips, activities and maps to your store and dive sites is a good idea. It is no substitute, however, for having this information available as web pages.
You also want to make sure that any link to a PDF is clearly identified as such. This way, there are no unpleasant surprises in store for your website’s visitors.
There are several ways you can do this:
- On client’s websites, we generally depict PDF links as thumbnails of the PDF document itself, with the Acrobat logo superimposed over it. And, just in case this graphic image fails to load, there is a back-up hyperlink below it.
- Many websites put a small Acrobat symbol next to any PDF hyperlinks, so that users better understand what it is that link accesses.
- At the very least, put the initials PDF in the link, so that users won’t expect to be taken to another web page.
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