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I've never felt obstructed by mild obfuscation and if anything it signals that the site owner is clueful and spam-sensitive, and therefore hopefully less likely to spam me.
How representative are you of the public at large?
Also, I'd be curious to see actual experimental results of how much each additional required action/click/decision reduces engagement (if at all). My hypothesis is that it does, and probably in a significant way.
In addition there's the visual appeal factor of nice form fields/buttons that scream "fill me / click me!"
And then there's also the impression it gives to the intended owner of the website.
It all adds up... to more hassles for the one making the site.
I don't know how representative I am but I'd generally rather use email than a form. Maybe you could look at some representative sites of other companies in the same sector and see what they do. Then generally try to follow existing practice.
It is probably fine to run your site on static hosting except have the contact form target be a PHP script on a separate shared hosting server. Traffic should be low enough that you could use some $5/y shared hosting to run the script.
A very simple completely statically hosted idea would be to just have a mailto link that is inserted into the page by some script on the page. The typical spammer bot won't run the script. The script would contain an obfuscated address and would de-obfuscate it at run time.
Yup, they're all cookie cutter boring websites with forms. This also shapes the desires of the website owner. Click a MAILTO link and be whisked away from the site? Figure out how to copy/paste an email address on mobile? Or remember it from a gif? Switch from a mobile browser to an email app? Too much effort, people won't bother. A form is right there, looks simple, well-integrated, easy.
At that point I'd rather run the whole site on the same host. Fewer components and points of failure.
Can CGI scripts be run on static hosts like netlify or gitlab pages?
P.S.
Fun fact, I know some people who think email is dead and it's all social media. They don't check emails often. They're also suspicious of others who don't use social media or who insist on email, fearing they must be hiding something. But that's a whole other story.
Oh hmm, I hadn't been thinking about mobile and don't know what happens if you click a mailto in a mobile browser. Ok, if you want a form, you want a form, fine.
No, cgi can't be run on pure static hosting. Cgi by definition runs a site-owner-supplied server-side script when the end user visits the cgi page. That means it is not static. You could have the site be all static except for the cgi target though. That shrinks the attack surface.
In a mobile browser, it just shows you installed email clients (e.g. GMail, phone's pre-installed email app, etc.) and PayPal (?!). mailto: links are more PITA on desktops which doesn't have outlook installed IMO. I'd still prefer emailing [email protected] which I can at least be sure that they recieved my inquiry rather that a janky form that I cannot be sure of.
@depricated why aren't you using Google Form as mentioned above in the tutorial.
A real live example: https://www.exoticvm.com/contact.html
Kudos to @hardgamers for sharing the link & yokowasis for the idea.
Google Form annoys the crap out of me and creates the impression of a cookie cutter site.
@BlaZe I'll probably use either Google Form or go with only a partially static site. Thanks for the live example. Do the responses get sent in an email notification that you can reply to directly from your email?
Nope. The responses are logged normally as how a user would goto a Google form and submit. This maybe a deal breaker for you though.
How often do you expect to receive responses from the contact form? if its less than I'd say you can go with the Google form method, copy the email ID & message content manually when trying to reply to the user.
Thanks for confirming. The issue is not frequency of responses, but rather the person who will be dealing with this is not particularly tech-savvy. The simpler it is for them to reply, the better. Having it all as email correspondence will be easiest vs having to check Google form responses, copy fields, etc. Less human intervention means less problems.
You can connect Google forms with zapier, which allows you to qutomate stuff (never personally used though).
https://zapier.com/apps/google-forms/integrations
Thanks for the idea. It seems zapier needs to integrate with specific providers, eg. Gmail, Zoho, etc. which makes it less flexible than a generic email. Also this would add yet another service/provider, and complicate a simple website.
This has been educational, but I think I'll stick with a dynamic site hosted in one place and instead look into static page caching plugins as needed.
I'd do it the other way and use a static site with a small amount of dynamism. E.g. use normal php hosting but with primarily .html files rather than .php files.
Good point, that's a good option too. It depends on whether I use Grav (dynamic + static page generating plugins) or Hugo (static + figure out forms on my own). Hugo seems really neat, but I'm slightly more familiar with Grav at this point, and I like the thought of not having to create/maintain my own form scripts. Most likely either will be more than adequate.
You don't have to create your own form script. There are plenty of existing ones.