WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 25Connecting by E-mail

Although social media has become an important way to connect with your site visitors, e-mail remains an equally important tool. This lesson shows you some easy ways to:

• Have visitors contact you by e-mail
• Collect visitor e-mails
• E-mail visitors automatically when you update your site

Some of this involves setting up third-party services, but they're either free or low cost.

Contacting You by E-mail

When you want visitors to reach you by e-mail, the two most common ways on websites are:

• Putting your e-mail address somewhere in the text
• Providing a contact form

WordPress makes both of these methods quite easy.

E-mail Addresses

Let me say at the outset: Do not put e-mail addresses anywhere on your site. That's because spammers regularly sweep your site looking for e-mail addresses to “harvest” and put on their lists.

If you choose to ignore this warning, at least do the following: Install a WordPress plugin that will attempt to hide your e-mail address from the evil spammers. Several of them are mentioned at the end of this lesson, but here's a bit about how they work.

Some plugins automatically detect that you've put an e-mail address into a Post, Page, or Widget and use various techniques to make it unreadable to the programs the spammer send around the Internet. Other plugins have you use a shortcode to enter e-mail addresses.

So if you're going to put an e-mail address in your text, what's the best way to do it?

You can enter an e-mail ...