This week I started reading the latest book by Marty Neumeier called The Designful Company which, simply put, should probably be required reading for all business executives or anyone who owns their own company today.
Early on in the book the above equation is referenced. For me it summarizes a key problem I have with most companies and their products but also one of the problems I have with the vast myriad of “design” companies out there. I’ll elaborate on this specifically in another piece (soon).
As with his other books, all of which I also highly recommend, there’s loads of keen, thoughtful advice that could help turn around companies that might be struggling in the current economy, but also help those who are thriving be even better, stronger and more mindful of their global impact.
When I moved the Notebook site over from the wishingline.com domain over to this one, one of the things I wanted to do was rebuild the contact form from scratch and integrate it into the base Movable Type install that manages things behind the scenes.
That was a fairly simple process overall and using a bit of PHP, jQuery and Ajax magic, I built the form so that it works whether Javascript is enabled in the browser or not. Unobtrusive progressive enhancement — it’s good. You should try it.
Where I ran into a problem though was that all of a sudden bots were going to town on the form and I was getting all kinds of spam through the form, despite work put into preventing that at the start — e.g. ensuring the form would only accept local requests from the same domain, using secret server-level key validation, etc.
Ultimately what proved to cure the problem: give the fields unusual names. If you have a field that collects a person’s name, don’t name it “name” or an email address, “email”. Bots look for that and can easily exploit it.
Truth be told: I knew this. Maybe you already do too, but an occasional reminder never hurts.
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