Today's topic is a simple little common mistake to watch out for. CFWebstore comes with a variety of pre-loaded store pages. One of these is the Contact Us page which includes an email form to use for your customers to contact you. The sample page includes fake contact information and a simple email link as well. Here's the page in the CFWebstore Demo:
Now, in the past, I made the mistake of including an email address that directed to my own domain. What happened is that many people edit this link, but they change just the text of it, not the underlying "mailto" link. So when people go to your site, and click on that link, the email they create then ends up coming to me! I of course have little idea what to do with it or where to forward it to. Often if I email the customer to try and help it get to the right place, they don't even remember what site they were on at the time.
Now, many people remove that email link which is not a bad idea. The page already has an email form on it which customers can use, and these links are commonly picked up by spambots. So if you do decide to leave it, you may want to change the text so it doesn't have a true email link (like mail-at-mysite.com). You can also use an ascii code for the ampersand as well which usually confuses the spambots as well (the latest 6.31 version of CFWebstore actually will encode email links like this for you). The important thing though is to be sure to change not just the text of the email, but the underlying mailto code as well...changing the text of the link does not change the link itself! After logging into your store as an admin, you can click the link to Edit the Page and scroll down to the content area which should use a WYSIWYG editor for altering the page content. You can switch to source view, or right-click on the link to bring up the function to edit the link and make sure that the mailto link is not going to a cfwebstore.com address. The funny thing is that I not long ago changed the text of this mail address to use a fake address, but missed changing the mailto link myself! Current versions of CFWebstore do use a fake address for both, so it's even more important that you ensure the email link is correct, or your customers will get a bounce if they try to send an email using it.
