Make an Email Address into a Clickable Link

Recently one of my new clubhosting networks snowmobile club website admins posed a question: "How do I make my email address clickable on posts and pages?"

In the Visual edtior tuitorial and video, we covered Links. Its that chain button thing. Well the simple and short answer is:

• In the editor, Highlight Text you want to make linkable, such as a Mail Us Text, or Email Address like [e-mail]
• Click the Link Button
• Remove the the http part, and replace it with mailto: then your email address.

Now pretty simple, notice we linked the part above. You can add a subject in it, and if you are using the visual editor for this, you can just type the phrase you want and it encodes it. Stay away from special characters though.

here's how we add subject

?subject=

So, mailing us, [e-mail] and we would like the subject to be "Help us with our snowmobile club website design!"

We simply do this

mailto:[e-mail]?subject=Help us with our snowmobile club website design!

Now lets try it in action:

Want help with your snowmobile club website design & hosting, just email us and ask!

 

Now, if you do this, do you need to worry about spam?

Short answer? No. Your snowmobile club website will not automatically dump you into the illegal spam rings of overseas mailers. Yes, a mailto link is harvested by scraping. But so are other things. Spam is a progressive thing. As the industry changes, spammers adapt. For instance, many used to space it out, or instead of saying @ they would say _AT_, etc.

Let's do a test. Think of the sailboat pictures. Stare at the below and tell me what you see.

• [e-mail]
• support_AT_clubhosting.org
• support @ clubhosting.org
• support @ clubhosting DOT org
• support-AT-clubhosting-DOT-org

Did you see the sailboat? 

me neither. I just saw the same email address redone a million times by some dummy trying to be witty. Guess what, HTML scrapers can see that to. They can look for TLDs (the .org .com .net .cc part of the domain), and variations above. Maybe if you replace it with complete jibberish that may help, but honestly, if you do, no one else will know what you are talking about either.

But lets not lose sight of what you're after - to be contacted by members of your snowmobile club, or have visitors to your snowmobile club website ask you information about joining your club, or snowmobile-esque related questions. Making yourself difficult to contact reduces the likelihood of successfull communication. As many members are busy, they may be using a smartphone to do it, and copying and pasting can sometimes be painful. Or maybe a desktop user will try their best, open their email program, see an important email, and forget all about joining your club.

Besides, is this the only place that has your email? I am going to take a stab in the dark and say no. So - make it simple for real people to contact you and don't worry about the mere possibility of illegal spam.

Yes, you will get more emails from cold calling sales/advertising people contacting your snowmobile club for this that in the other. However, sometimes that type of junk mail is wanted. After all - ClubHosting used that form of communication at some point in our history to get clubs signed on!