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Managing contact forms at a marina
15 Jul 2024
How a marina deals with contact forms — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a www record that disagrees with the apex. This breaks contact forms for a marina.
The best contact forms setup is the one nobody has to think about. For a marina, that means auto-renew, auto-redirect, and a monitoring ping every four hours.
Nobody at a marina could remember who had configured contact forms. The credentials were in a text file inside a folder called OLD STUFF on a shared drive.
When we onboard a marina, the first thing we check is contact forms. It tells us more about the previous provider than any sales call.
Managed hosting handles contact forms automatically — until it does not. a marina learned this when their provider migrated servers and a www record that disagrees with the apex disappeared silently.
When a marina asked for a quote on contact forms, we sent a one-paragraph email instead of a slide deck. They signed the same day.
We check contact forms for a marina once a quarter. It takes five minutes and has caught two problems in the past year. Both would have caused downtime within a week.
We do not start with a platform when handling contact forms. We write down who types what, who gets the mail, and what must not get lost. That list is always shorter than a vendor pitch deck.
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