Will Bontrager Interviews, Q&As About Building a Successful Website,

The full question was actually, "In 2007 and beyond what would you think to be the best way to reduce spam for site owners and webmasters? I'd like your answer to consider all aspects of email and how it might impact on a site owner and their online business - contact forms, contact via email, using email to subscribe to newsletters, email on forums, email spoofing, what to do when you get spam etc."

And you can see Will's full answer here on my Build Promote Profit TIPS website

Steve, you don't ask easy questions.

How do we go about it? Ask for references and cross our fingers. Yet, that has not been a very successful method.

We did find a service (which we now provide through one of our web sites) to measure important metrics of some hosting companies. You'll find it here.

I can't recommend the hosting company we're with right now. We're about ready to move.

Forum software. We use both YaBB and phpBB.

I recommend anything repetitive and onerous be automated.

If it's onerous but done only once or twice, no benefit would be gained from automation. If it's repetitive but fun to do, keep the joy and don't automate.

However, if it's both repetitive and onerous, automate it and have more time for joy.

Examples of things that can be automated with web sites are gathering statistics, selling and delivering downloadable products, answering support email (mostly, some are likely to require manual intervention), links checking, testing forms, pretty much anything that's repetitive.

There are other ways to automate things, but cron is central to most scheduled automation on Unix/Linux servers. If you don't know how to use cron, search the 'net for "cron tutorial." Or find a cron service.

I'll use Bontrager Connection as an example. Of our domains, it is one of the lighter users of automation.

~~ We use Master Form V4 to send us certain activity logs every day.

~~ The content management system updates the entire site every week (proprietary software nearing release).

~~ Pro.Rate automatically publishes the current rating and updates the number when someone rates an article.

~~ The contact form automatically routes questions and comments to the correct person (using Master Form V4).

~~ Link clicks are automatically logged so we know which are most popular and which are sick dogs (using ClickWatch).

~~ Information requested through a special form is automatically emailed to the person requesting it (using Master Autoresponder Bank). Some articles have a place for an email address to cause the article to be delivered (using the same software).

~~ Ads are automatically rotated, some with Content Carousel and some with Master Merry-Go-Round.

As you can see, all those things are repetitive. We would not be happy campers if we had to do them manually.

The things that are not automated are those we enjoy doing. Site design and article writing are examples.

"Steve, thank you for this opportunity to answer your questions and, hopefully, be of some service to your clients and web site visitors." - Will Bontrager

Well that's what he said next to me, but he could answer your questions if you liked. Subscribe to his Possibilities Newsletter (a sample edition shown here) at http://www.willmaster.com/possibilities/

And do come back to this lens often, as I shall be adding links to other interviews whenever someone else asks Will. Thanks.

Now if you wouldn't mind rating this lens or giving me some feedback, I'd be much obliged. :-)

Steve M Nash

PS By the way, Will is a Perl/CGI programmer who also knows a thing or two about JavaScript. That means he writes useful programs like anti-spam contact forms, rate-it scripts, recommend-it and tell-a-friend scripts and even online survey scripts. Some of this software is even free! Find out more at http://www.willmaster.com