Contact Information

[KevinBE]

Do you list your home address on your Web page? I was wondering if I should do this or pay for a post office box. Are there disadvantages to listing your real address? What if I want to attract local customers? Your input would be appreciated.

[jeaniesa]

Timely question Kevin!! I'm wondering the exact same thing, so I don't have an answer for you. But, I'll be anxiously waiting to see the wisdom of the list!

FWIW, I have a neighbor with a home business up the street and he does list his home address on his website.

Jeanie

[chiquitita]

Listing your home/street address is necessary if you only have a PO Box because FedEx will not deliver to a PO Box. However, if you rent a box from a Mailboxes Etc. or other mail store, you will have an address which will read 123 blah road Suite 201 so FedEx will deliver and the rental place will hold it for you or put it in a larger box with a key in your small box.

[chiquitita]

Unfortunately, I have that problem with the post office. Opened mail, mail delivered to the wrong place, bent photos.... The best way is to have it delivered to your home/work via Fed Ex I suppose.

[clare]

I use a PO Box - for safty as well as to avoid heeps of junk mail. I didn't want my address on the web for quite a few reasons. In England the PO Box number is followed by your town so people know you are local - I havent experience any problems as yet with the service, apart from they never answer the phone when I want to be lazy and check if there is any mail without leaving the house!

Clare

[winwintoo]

Kevin, your name is on your web site - a search of switchboard.com revealed your address and phone number. whowhere even told me your age and if I was willing to pay $10 promised to tell me a lot more about you.

It's no longer possible to traverse the web incognito.


Take care, Margaret

[DJ Dubovsky]

There are millions of wonderful honest people online and there are millions of bad ones that can really make your life a living hell. I personally use a PO box because I just don't want to publicize any more of my life online than is already out there. You may post your real address and go on for years with little or no trouble but then something bad happens and the damage is done. Same with your home phone as well. It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. I actually think it hinders your business putting a PO box instead of a physical address because physical addresses give you credibility but I don't trust people. Doug always warns us against posting our e-mail addresses on the threads for the same reason. It can become public domain to all sorts of junk mail pests and criminals.
DJ

[KevinBE]

Thanks for all the good info guys. I guess it's really too late to think about protecting my idenity. Thanks for the eye opener Margaret, that whowhere site kind of bothers me but I guess there's nothing I can do about it.

I'll just have to see how things go after I put the site online. Hopefully I will have thought about everything I need to do before I go public. Lots to think about.

[CJ Swartz]

I notice that Doug doesn't have his address on his website. Of course, I believe that he's said that he doesn't get many referrals from the site either.

[d_kendal]

I've actually been thinking about exactly the same thing lately. What I'm planning on doing for contact info on my website is give my cell phone # (since that's not too hard to change if it starts to get abused) and email address then from there when somebody contacts me with a business inquiry I can give them my home address. the only other bit of info I'll be putting on there is the fact that I'm located in Edmonton, AB since I'm mostly looking for local business.

- David

[CJ Swartz]

Kevin, those people-data search engines like Switchboard, etc. must use the phone book for their info because I don't show up when I search for my name. I have an unpublished phone number.

David, I think your strategy sounds good. Serious customers would like to know your general location, and you can screen in those serious customers either through the email or phone calls. I'd use a freebie email address, of course, rather than my main one, as I'm sure you'll do.

[jeaniesa]

CJ - just wondering why a "freebie" e-mail address? It seems to me that a paid-for e-mail address adds some credibility to your legitimacy - especially if you're not going to put your street address on the site.

If the freebie address is b/c of the spam it will generate, there was another thread discussing that issue here.

If for another reason, I'm curious.

Jeanie

[chiquitita]

I have to agree with Jeanie. When I see blah@hotmail.com on a website I don't get the impression of a professional. Truthfully, even when I see a site with an address like blah@aol.com, I have serious reservations.

[CJ Swartz]

I was just thinking about avoiding spam. If the website provides it's own email address, that would be fine. I would not use my email reserved for family and friends. I hate spam. I don't want to delete it - I want to not get it in the first place. Just my opinion.

I will have to read more about Kevin's suggestion - Hivelogic Email Address Encoder.

[Doug Nelson]

I considered putting my contact info on my site, but I work out of my home and firmly believe only very brave people put their home address up on the web. If I worked out of an office or storefront I'd have my address up in a heartbeat, along with a map and driving instructions.

I've said before that the web is not the best way to find customers for work such as ours, and that most customers want to work locally, with someone they can meet and hand their one-of-a-kind heirloom photos to in-person. I feel that, if I did put an address on my website, I would get more local business, but probably also less non-local business.

I get next to zero spam via my work website.

[winwintoo]

I just have to gloat for a minute here

The built-in mail program in the latest version of Mac OS is really good at handling spam. You train it to recognize junk and lets you bounce unwanted mail so it looks like your address isn't valid - hopefully the spammers will remove your address from their list.

In about a week, I've gone from 100+ spam messages a day to less than 10.

End of gloat.

It won't be long until the other mail programs catch up and provide the same kind of relief and then the spammers will catch up and ........

Take care, Margaret

[d_kendal]

Originally posted by CJ Swartz
David, I think your strategy sounds good. Serious customers would like to know your general location, and you can screen in those serious customers either through the email or phone calls. I'd use a freebie email address, of course, rather than my main one, as I'm sure you'll do.

CJ - I'll be keeping my main address (the one from my internet provider) for personal mail, and I'll create email addresses at the domain name of my site for inquiries (i.e. inquiries@businessname.com etc.)
I agree with Jeanie and chiquitita, if I saw a site using Hotmail or one of those others for the main email I'd be a little worried about credibility.

- David

[KevinBE]

The other day I saw an add on TV, I can't remember the product, but I remember giving them low regard when I saw them list their e-mail as blabla@hotmail.com My hosting company has offered me several e-mail addresses from my own site. I have been wondering how well this was going to work.

CJ I tried to take my own advice and I checked out the hivelogic link. As far as I can tell the download is a java script. Since I don't have java or speak java it wont do me any good rightnow. They do offer an online e-mail spoof script generator. It only works from the account you have set up in outlook on the PC you are browsing with. I want to spoof kevin@restored-memories.com . I will have to spend more time investigating this. They seem to have a compiled program for MAC OS only, but I may have moissed something.

I'm going to have to give this identity thing more thought. It is very thought provoking.

[winwintoo]

Hi Kevin, I went to the Hiveware site and was able to convert my email address (which isn't an outlook Pc email)

I'm on a mac, so it's possible they put up a different page for Macs.

The conversion ends up being a bit of Javascript code that you put in the head of your page - and you have to alter it so it shows up where you want it to. I just made sure it would work, haven't tried to figure out where to put it yet.

As far as the applications they offer - there is indeed a Mac OS version, but at the bottom of the products page, there is a Java (which is not the same as Javascript by the way) version that should run on your computer as long as you have Java Runtime Enviroment on your computer. If you have a newer version of Windows, you probably have the JRE unless you took it off for some reason.

If none of the above works for you, I'd be happy to encode your address and send it to you.

Take care, Margaret

[KevinBE]

Hi Margaret, I wonder how it knew my e-mail address then. It didn't ask me for an address before it ran. I don't believe in magic so I assumed it must have found the address on my PC somehow. A cookie maybe? Maybe I need to turn my cookie controls up a notch. I don't like the idea that a site could get that kind of info by itself. I had expected the program to ask me for my address.

I have a fairly new load of XP Pro on my PC and Windows didn't know what to do with that file. I probably should be able to locate and install the java runtime program now that I know what I need.

[winwintoo]

Hi Kevin - that seems odd. They couldn't pick up your address from your PC, web pages can't pick up stuff from your local machine. And if it was a cookie, you would have had to put the information in the cookie.

Here's the page I went to - where it says you@yourdomain.com, type in the address you want to enkode and click the button. The javascript for the encoded email will appear in a box below (scroll down a bit)

http://www.hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php

Take care, Margaret

[jeaniesa]

Kevin, I don't think you need the JRE for JavaSCRIPT. I got confused about the difference between Java and JavaScript not too long ago in this thread. JavaScript code is simply inserted into your HTML file. (The site for hiveware says to paste it in wherever you want the link to appear.) It's a fairly painless process really.

Jeanie