With all or the current debate ( of which i choose not enter ) going on regarding real identities, both here and on our sites, i allows for discussion of the topic. Moving forward I see one of the big down falls with directories will be ability to effectively run or promote a decent directory with out being up front, but may be wrong. Regardless of this I have my full ( and proper ) name, business address, full telephone contact, mail address and company registration listed on my contacts page. I prefer the real deal, but i can only remember probably less than a handful of directories here even offering that information ?. I suspect this is due to many younger people operating out of bedrooms and in other cases i feel it is a misconception that in some way people feel they can hide behind the wall of the WWW and become and invisible shadow in the night. From my personal view only i feel those days are over as people now want to work and deal with real people, i suppose time will tell. Your thoughts ?
Well Pete you touched on a bit of a sore subject for me that I have some strong feelings about. I did not go as far to list my phone number on my directory but everything else is there. Since I have to list my phone number on my other site here is what I have found happens. I literally get abused with telemarketers calling me wanting to sell me something. Most often it has to do with search engine positioning. It has gotten so bad that I have to screen my incoming calls through caller id and let the unrecognized long distance area codes go to voice mail. I just do not have time to deal with all the telemarketers. Not only that, they will ocassionally find me by clicking on adwords campaign ads which I run and that really ticks me off. It is bad enough that they just waste my time but costing me a couple bucks by clicking on an ad to find my phone number so they can then call me and waste my time pushes me over the edge and that company ends up in my blog. So the point is if you want to put your phone number on the site, you should be aware of some of the people who will be calling you.
Good Point Bruce, been a life time dealing with nutters on the phone , butif that happens i will take a email and we will call you back approach, thanks for the heads up.
Excellent thread, Pete! I used to have the company details on websites for a few years and I experienced the same phone spam as Bruce mentioned. I took them of after a friend told me a story about some indian business stealing his company details and placing them on their website. Basically those guys were not Rohit, Patel, Singh or whatever but they became John's, Michael's telling people they are a british company operating from London (they even had pictures with my friend's offices on their website). As most of our new clients are coming through old clients that refer our business, personally I don't fancy having the details listed on any of the websites we operate. I only have contact forms (and they are spammed like hell)... if the potential clients are UK based we invite them to our offices or we might send someone to their offices to further discuss on their projects. The internet changed a lot in the last few years and became a pretty unsafe place where lots of idiots operate so it might be better to keep your details safe...just my 2c Thanks
I am not happy with the idea of placing personal contact details on the www page. Its happened to me in the past, I have got calls at 3am in the night, 1pm afternoon, 5am morning.... for some offering me good SEO position and advertising options. Moreover, there have been lotta fax spam and sms spam too. And on a fan club site when I placed my company details, I had abusive calls and threat for not approving their comments. I even once had to call back a number and reach his place with a police inspector for tons of sms spam. So I personally am against the idea of revealing the Elvis... man I have that contact page.. hit the contact button.
LOL Elvis has left the building, just pulled down my info and left the form, it's a funny world we live in, but up there for thinking down there for tripping, with the great advice here why do i need to trip over the same rocks. cheers all, still bloody sad this f up world is like this.
In a business point of view, if you are selling anything but virtual goods, then yes, you ideally (and really) should have your contact details accessible on your site. With virtual goods (e-books, directory listings, etc) - then no, I don't see what benefit it gives your customers knowing your address. By all means yes, give your contact info out to those who are actually customers, but not everyone and anyone. Whois information is a completely different story, I am 100% against whois privacy protection, frankly it's a load of BS and just goes to show who's got something to hide and who doesn't. Most likely from the tax man Does anyone use whois privacy protection for a substantive reason?
Yes I do make a use of it when targetting adsense, youth oriented & celeb fan sites. Today youth are so smart, if you don't approve their comments, delete their posts.. bang on.. you will get a email.. then a phone call! With word like a**hol* , moth**fu*ke*.... blah blah I'l get you banned, you suck, il hack your portal, if you have guts approve my comments, my posts... etc etc. You see whois protection is more for protecting yourself from senseless kids, in my experience webmasters who are adults and matured never trouble you.
Surely there's only so many teenage spammers you can ban from your blogs that actually give you abuse? Let's face it - the Average Joe teenager won't have a clue what Whois information is. I suspect the reason you do receive abuse, however, is because they won't get their $0.05 for posting a spammy comment on your blog in the first place
In which world are you man... I know 14-17 yrs old teens running big portals and earning $$$$ permonth. Moreover average teens spent a lotta time on the net today to learn "make money online" , "hacking" , "networking" , "groups" , "chatrooms".... teens are advanced today. A lot of them spend time on using softwares to change their IP addresses for adsense fraud business, you think teens are still unaware of whois? Open you eyes..SpiderMan...Wakeup!
Ok. You have a very narrow minded view on life. You think ALL teenagers are in to making money online, scamming and making websites? Think you need to come back to reality mate
That's true. Teenagers are a diverse lot, you can't group em together. There are all types. There are the online entrepreneurs and then there are the online consumers.
Maybe your eyes have a problem mate, when did I say ALL? Moreover did I not mention teens online are also into chatrooms, groups, networking? You really need to wakeup from sleep and read someones post properly. Anyways, I have no more time to waste on you, carry on with you weird thoughts and ideas.
I am also talking about that set of teens who are oversmart. That's why we do need whois and whois does helps for many other reasons too.
All my websites [almost all] are with namecheap for one main reason. Whoisguard I like being mysterious and stuff. I don't want people to know that i'm the slackjawed fat kid living next door. Besides it's better to be safe than sorry.
First off, I don't think someone who wanders upon my business site should be provided with a phone number and street address without even providing me with their own email. I will freely share both with clients. It's a trust thing, plain and simple. I do include my city and state to allow people to know that I am an American (a big issue for writers) and that I am in the eastern standard time zone. I have a mix of websites and there is absolutely no reason for a client to know about my hobby and experimental sites. They are irrelevant to my ability to complete their project. When and if they are actually relevant, I might use them as a part of my portfolio otherwise it's nobody's business except mine, my hosting provider and the tax man. As to what teenagers do and don't know...there are many high schools where web programming is part of the curriculum. These kids do know their way around the net and finding whois records would more than likely be part of their classes. If, not it would take a single post on their MySpace to find out from their friends. One of our local grammar/middle school's students are actually programming and maintaining many of the small business websites in their town - you better believe those kids know how to find information on the net. And then there's simply typing "how to find contact information about a website" into Google - result 13 would tell them exactly what to do. Or even quicker, "how to find who owns a website" - check out #1.