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Coming back to the personal website patterns, I riffed about standard content pages (or as other people call them: slash pages or cornerstones) before in general, and I think that the contact page is a rather uncontroversial candidate.

I said in Websites as a catalyst for personal relationships that I think the personal web is designed and destined to be a two-way street. But that was more of statement of the social than of technical nature of the medium.

By its design the web decouples sender and receiver with regard to location and time. The author of a website shouts into the void of the ether. The reader of a website can remain in obsurity. They may choose to stay but a line in a server log. In any meaningful sense, a bidirectional communication can only be established by the reader of a website.

Therefore a Contact page is created to aid and facilitate the establishment of feedback and meaningful conversations. A Contact page communicates at least one medium by which the author of a website intends to receive messages. It must be a reasonable assumption that the chosen medium is accessible to many of their readers. It certainly is not limited to one channels. Email adress, a contact form or a list of handles on preferred social websites are some (non-exhaustive) examples. What ever the preferred channel of the websites author might be, the Contact page makes it explicit and prominently linked. Thereby it provides an affordance to make the public writing a starting point for a private dialog, which in turn might become the seed of a meaningful interpersonal relationship.

One particular special case or enhancement of a generic contact page pattern might take the form of a Standing Invitation. This is a format that was to my knowledge pioneered by Patrick McKenzie to explicitly encourage cold emails from potentially shy readers. Quite a few people have followed suit, for example: Hillel Wayne, Lars Hupel, Trevor McKendrick, Kai Davis, Adam Hawkins, Bill Tribble, Matthew Palmer, Chris Paika and Andrea Della Corte.