Email is good.

David Bushell, after battling with a contact form for years, just said screw it and now just publishes an email address on his contact page.

Kind of a zero-tech solution to allow someone visiting a webpage to send a message. Just… use the thing you already know how to use.

I like it honestly.

Are contact forms just outdated in general? Everyone seems to embed a Calendly widget these days. That’s not my style. I like the tiny bit of additional friction required to send an email. If someone can’t be bothered their message probably wasn’t serious. I’m not looking to maximise meaningless engagement.

Contact forms generally just generate an email anyway.

So why do people use forms instead?

Wellllllllll. There are kinda lots of reasons.

The cheif among them is that a form isn’t just a textarea, it can have dropdowns and checkboxes and stuff that structure a response. But besides that…

• It’s a UX thing. People might have something in mind right this second. If they can just type it in a box quick and hit the button, they might be more apt to do that than hand-crafting an email elsewhere.
• The form might embed extra information. For example, a customer support form might look like an email (just type something into a box), but behind the scenes it might be recording your UserID, browser/platform/version, referrrer, or who knows what else along with it to give extra context to the request.
• The form might submit to a database first, allowing the data to be stored/analyzed in other ways.
• The form might submit to a server which also processes the data in other ways, like routing it to different emails, sending notifications to other services, etc.

But the contact form on your personal website? Maybe it doesn’t need to be there at all.