Another common link you might want to add to your page is an email link. I am going to scroll down a little bit here to a place where I might add an email linked to this page. Send your favorite websites to me. I am going to highlight the email address that I have typed in to the page and I am going to click a little button up here at the top to create an email link. You can also create hyperlinks with this. I just like using the Properties Inspector. But for the email link, I always use this button because watch this, it automatically inserts the text and automatically inserts the email information. So when I click okay, it sets that link for me.
The other thing it automatically sets when you use that button is this little Mailto: at the very beginning of your email address. You can manually type in any link into this space, but if it is an email link, make sure you do Mailto: no space and then the email address. Setting a link like this means that when a user clicks on the email address or whatever text or image is linked to an email address, whatever program they have set for email on their system will automatically launch an insert your email address into the “to” area of their email program. That is a nice time saving trick for them but it is also something I try to warn people about. If you are going to link to an email address, just make sure that your users know that it is an email address and that it is likely to launch their email program. So either say email link or link something like your actual email address so it is obvious that it will be an email link and not just a link to another page.
Some people do not like having their computers taken over and having their email program launched automatically like that without at least knowing that is what is coming. And you may think that I am crazy to put my actual email address on this page. A lot of designers do not like to do that. That is because they know that spammers scour the web collecting email addresses off of web pages. I do not like that either and I have seen lots of ways around that. Some people will put their email address into a form so they can hide the address and still let you contact them but they will not ever make the actual email address visible. Some people spread out the address on their web page with spaces or words like Janine at Digitalfamily . com and assume that people will figure out what that really is supposed to be but automatic systems that try to find email addresses will not be able to pick it up that way.
If you are that worried about spam, you may want to consider one of these tricks. I have decided that I want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to my website to contact me. And especially beginners to the internet often get confused when you use some of those tricks. So I use my real email address and I include the actual address in the text on the page. Because some people do not have their email set up or they are going to write it down and email you later and then I just have really good spam filters on my email. Use whatever works best for you but remember, always at least let your readers know or your visitors know that it is an email link and not another kind of link when you set this kind of link.
