I would like to ask others more experienced than I, how you deal with the internet with sharing contact information if you are using it as a business?

I am finishing making my (photography) services available over the net. But rather than posting a business card with my phone number or my personal address, how should I be doing this? I would like to hear from all perspectives and POV's if I could please? There must be benefits and risks all around.

So far, after setting up a simple web comments form, I was sent much spam. 
I learned more from these pages and I started tracking spammers ISP addresses and adding them to my htaccess file.

Then I realized I was getting only a single type of spam, multiple links pasted into the form.
Although I kept adding the the htaccess for each piece of spam, the spammers seemed to have an unlimited supply of isp addresses.

I learned more from these pages and I started checking in the php code to make sure there were no multiple htp:// lines in the comments.
This has completely blocked my spam, finally.

The question I have  is how should I look at putting a contact phone number of contact address online? What security features if any should I consider before taking this step?

Should I just roll the dice and see what happens? Should I put in a challenge question first like for joining a forum? What about putting off potential customers? What about genuine security and what is smart and what is not smart?

Thanks

Hi levelbest!

Put business contact information such as telephone and street address in text on every page. This tells potential real customers that you are a stable business that can be found, with nothing to hide. Spammers don't have much use for it, but being findable in the real world is a prerequisite for legitimate business, just as is filing a DBA (doing business as). If you have an important reason that you don't want to be contacted personally, then you have many options, such as marketing your product through retailers.

Email addy is a different thing. You have two kinds of visitors interested in your email:
1) spammers, mostly robots
2) real human customers

The humans are of two types:
1) those who communicate by email
2) those who prefer to discuss orders by telephone

You know your type of clients. If they are the second type, your email addy isn't very important to them. You could post it as an image, so it would not be attractive to spammers. It would also not be accessible to blind visitors, but they could telephone.

Every first-time business crosses this bridge and wonders about this. I would predict that it will be more of a worry Not to be found, and a "good problem" to be so findable that your business grows in unanticipated ways.


I think this would cause suspicion and would not really have the expected up side.

Draw a line between business and personal, and then stick to it. Separation of these goes beyond just separating finances. One might sleep and eat in the same location where the business is conducted, but deciding where to draw the line is something every business goes through, and usually more than once.

If you have any information that you don't want to be public, or don't want it to be at risk for being copied, don't put that online.