Building My Website (3): Getting in Contact

Another iteration and my Contact page now looks like this:

To continue filling out the page, and to allow people contact me via email, I’ve added the contact form provided with the template, along with a few of my own changes.

The first of my changes was to the text of the opening paragraph, some of the placeholder text, and the success message. The text in place came across as a bit slick and insincere and I wanted something more authentic. The new text might be a bit informal for a professional site, but what I want to get across on this site in general is something more authentic to me. That would definitely not be something very slick or corporate.

Next, I was able to add in a section-link with an auto-scroll from the opening paragraph text down to the social links section. The social links are now below the fold on most screen sizes, so I wanted some way of pointing them out. At some stage in the future I might add them to the footer. For now, I was able to use a few tips from the Section Link article on Webflow University to set things up as described above.

Webflow University was also useful in helping me understand how to set up Form Submission. Pretty much everything was set up out of the box, but the article was helpful in giving me an understanding of how it worked.

The article I did use in setting up the form was the one on adding a reCaptcha. As much as I want people to get in touch, I don’t want spam! It was a bit tricky to add the reCaptcha element to the form. Some glitch in webflow means you have to add it to the navigation panel first, rather than straight to the UI. Once I gotten it in place, I just needed to go the Google reCaptcha page to set up a site key and secret key, and copy them into the Webflow Forms menu.

With that done, and a couple of clicks to publish on webflow, my contact form was up and running.

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