What a good contact page should look like

January 27th, 2008 · No Comments

One of the most important pages of a commercial website is the contact page.

A clear contact-page is also important for e-commerce sites. It gives confidence and customers can see that a “real company” owns this particular website. When surfing on the internet I see a lot of lousy contact-pages. In this article, I describe the minimal demands for a contact page.

Minimal Demands for a contact page
Every contact page should include:

Name
Address (Street, number, postal code, state, country)
Telephone number
Fax number
Email address
Email contact form

Email address
An email address should be clickable. This means than an email-program will open automatically, when a customer clicks the specific link.

Anticipate Spam
There are a lot of spamming-sites who scan your website to find your email-address. Of course you don’t want that to happen. For this reason it is better to translate your email-link to Javascript. Happily, you don’t have to do this yourself. Go to this website; fill in the name of your link and the email-address you want to hide. Than check “Javascript” and next you click “conceal email”. They will send you a specific code, which you can paste on your contact page wherever you want the link to appear.

Email contact form
Not everyone has their own email program on their PC (e.g. Hotmail and Gmail users). For these customers every contact page should contain a contact form. Otherwise these customers cannot contact your company.

Contact form tips:

Don’t ask to much, otherwise new customers will be discouraged and leave your website
Do NOT make an “edit” button. Otherwise there will be a risk that a customer will use this button instead of using the “sent” button.
Make sure, there is enough space to answer the questions

Extra’s for a contact page
You can also add extra details to your contact page like:

Skype details;
MSN/Live details;
Chat function;
Linked In details;

I wish you luck with making your contact page. When you have finished it or when you want our critical opinion, replay with your URL and your contact page. We will give our “critical” opinion.

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