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Email Obfuscation

When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to make it difficult (impossible?) for the email address to be harvested without your permission. The email address however needs to readable & usable by your human visitors - otherwise what's the point?

There are many methods available for email obfuscation. I have chosen one, CSS direction reversal, as my personal favourite. It's lightweight, supported by all modern browsers, easy to implement and deploy and effective.

Simply put, we create a CSS style that reverses the displayed direction of any text to which the style is applied. For an email address we add the REVERSED text to the web page and apply the custom style. When this page is viewed in a browser the visitor will see the email address in the usual, readable direction however any person, or harvester, who copies this email address text will only be able to copy the reversed text as it is coded into the page. Email harvesters do not process CSS rules.

Here's an example - try to copy & paste it:

gro.liamon@0-elpmaxe

One drawback with this method is that the email address cannot be linked using "mailto:". If you want to provide a linked email address you will have to use another method, such as that provided by Heal Your Church Web Site. This tool lets you create an obfuscated, linked email address.

Last Updated: Fri May 2010 11:47

Good, fast, cheap

We offer three kinds of service

You can pick any two.

This is the Designers' One Rule. When creating a project, clients may choose only two options - they can't have it all. It's a "rule" for Life that applies aptly to design - clients simply have to deal with it. And we, as Web designers, must also accept this as fact.

And so, here it is:

GOOD service FAST won't be CHEAP

Choose Good and Fast and we will postpone every other job, cancel all appointments and stay up 25-hours a day just to get your job done. Of course don't expect it to be Cheap.

GOOD service CHEAP won't be FAST

Choose Good and Cheap and we will do a great job for a discounted price however you'll have to be patient until we have some free time from paying clients.

FAST service CHEAP won't be GOOD

Choose Fast and Cheap and you can expect an inferior job delivered on time. You truly get what you pay for and in our opinion this is the least favorable choice of the three. In fact we most likely won't even offer this option - financially it's a poor choice for us and professionally we don't wish to be associated with low-quality work.

Last Updated: Fri Sep 2009 11:47