Make Sure your Website Contact Form works...

[Ashley_Price]

Yes, this is IT & Internet, but I think it's good to have it here where most people can see it.

I've just tried to contact someone and I've used the website contact form and three errors/problems came up, one of which meant I couldn't send the message:

1/ The text in the boxes was so small that it was difficult to see what I was typing (even with my glasses on)

2/ The left-hand side of the Comments box was badly aligned, so you couldn't see the first letter on each line.

3/ But worse of all was the fact the Phone Number field was set up for American (10 digit) numbers, and had to be in the specific layout "(###)###-####" - this means it wouldn't work for UK landline or mobile numbers which are, generally, 11 digits long.

When I hit "SEND" the form refused to go until I "corrected" the phone number to the right layout, as shown in 3 above.

Fortunately, I can contact the person by other means, but I wonder how many people have tried then given up and gone else where.

So if you use a "Contact Us" form or similar on your site, make sure it will work so that people can send you messages, or else you could lose custom.

 

[lynxus]

Couldn't agree more.

Not only should you ensure that your contact form works. You should also make it clear who has been notified and when to expect a reply or at least when it may be read.

Simply stating
"Thanks for contacting us"

Isn't really helpful and makes you (me) feel like it will just end up in a junk folder somewhere.

Something like.
"Your message has been received. We endeavor to reply to all queries within 24 hours"


Then again,
If you were a site that has a lot of internet based engagement then other solutions may be best suited ( Shameless self plug: live chat )

But yeah, The main points I like to raise is:
1) Make sure it works
2) Make sure it goes to the right person within your business
3) Ensure that your end users have been fully informed of what will happen and when."Manage their expectations correctly"


-G

 

[ryedale]

And if you change the mail address that you want contact enquiries to go to - make sure you let your web developer know if he manages the site for you..

Happened several times that the client doesn't remember to tell us and then wonders why they've had no enquiries for months!

 

[JElder]

And please please have an email address too. I don't like using forms as I then have to keep a separate note of what I sent and when, rather than looking in my sent items.

Some systems do send an automatic copy, but generally you cant tell until you have already completed and sent the form and lost the content. I'll always use a standard email address where possible.

 

[Ashley_Price]

And please please have an email address too

Many sites don't show the email address as well as the form because they are concerned about it being "hoovered up" by hacking software that will then mean they get tonnes of spam.

 

[Clive.Hornsby]

A Contact Us Form should be on every website and it is amazing how many businesses are losing out on sales because people cannot get in contact with them via their website. Okay they can always phone, but will you be there to answer the phone at 11.30 pm on Sunday night? Make it easy for people to get in touch with your business.

This brings me back to the first post about how bad some contact forms are. I always advise testing contact forms as if you are a prospective customer, so you know it is right. This also applies to all business processes as it is very easy to annoy a customer and give the impression you don't care.

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

Good point Ashley - yes mine certainly works sadly used lately by far too many people trying to sell me things I REALLY dont want

 

[Nuno]

A Contact Us Form should be on every website

Why? What is wrong with an email address (which legally has to be there anyway)?
I can see the point in forms if you are trying to elicit certain information only, but a generic form along the lines of "Your Message here" is no better than email, and in many cases, as mentioned above, doesn't give the user a copy, making it worse than an email.

 

[Clive.Hornsby]

Websites should have both email and contact form options as you need to make it easy for people to contact you by multiple methods. The legal compliance is a given but very few websites are fully compliant.

There is nothing wrong with an email address and some people will prefer to use this method. The downside of this for the website owner is that email addresses can easily be harvested from websites by bots, which increases the amount of spam and junk email they will receive. The best way is to use an image of the email which looks identical but the user then has to type in the email address and for many this is too much trouble.

A Contact Form is easy for the user to fill in and does not give away your email address. I take your point they do not have a copy of the email but it is a request for information or to elicit a response.

A contact form is also one of the criteria for analysing a website, so should be included.

 

[UseYourWeb]

If you realy want the email address on the site add it as an image, that way the crawlers wont pick it up as text and you'll get a lot less spam

 

[Nuno]

Loading an email address as an image means you have to put the address behind it. It is not hard to scrape that sort of info. So the image thing is a no starter really.

A contact form is also one of the criteria for analysing a website, so should be included.

What does this criteria show? Who set this as a criteria? You may well be right and I may well have missed it but I have never before seen that said.

 

[UseYourWeb]

Loading an email address as an image means you have to put the address behind it. It is not hard to scrape that sort of info. So the image thing is a no starter really.

Erm... not sure you do have to put the address behind it?? im pretty sure you can just make an image with your email address and then just put the image on the page without having to give away a crawlable version of the address. Are we deffinately talking about the same thing here?

 

[UseYourWeb]

What does this criteria show? Who set this as a criteria? You may well be right and I may well have missed it but I have never before seen that said.

Depends on who's doing the analysis, if it's a person looking to contact you then it's pretty important, if it's Google then a contact form wont make any difference in terms of rankings

 

[Nuno]

Erm... not sure you do have to put the address behind it?? im pretty sure you can just make an image with your email address and then just put the image on the page without having to give away a crawlable version of the address. Are we deffinately talking about the same thing here?

No, you are right. You can do it that way.
Personally, and it's only a personal preference, I prefer websites that are user friendly and have clickable email contacts which take you straight through to your email client. IMHO I think unclickable links look amateur.

 

[Nuno]

Depends on who's doing the analysis, if it's a person looking to contact you then it's pretty important, if it's Google then a contact form wont make any difference in terms of rankings

As I have already said, an email provides the user a copy and in most generic cases is just as user friendly as a form. So a contact form as said is mostly redundant unless you are wanting to harvest particular information rather than just let the user make contact.
In fact, in my experience, I have seen resistance to using forms as users , rightly or wrongly, think they are part of a big brother type information gathering system. They don't seem to feel this with email.

 

[amphis software]

we find that people will often leave a message on our zopim online chat (when we are offline) rather than send an email or use our contact form. so that's another easy way for people to contact you.

Tom

 

[digital way]

Why? What is wrong with an email address (which legally has to be there anyway)?
I can see the point in forms if you are trying to elicit certain information only, but a generic form along the lines of "Your Message here" is no better than email, and in many cases, as mentioned above, doesn't give the user a copy, making it worse than an email.

Putting an email on a website opens it up to massive amounts of spam. Some website owners won't have the technical expertise to cut off the spam before it gets to their inbox. If they are using their phone to download emails there's nothing worse than downloading 50 spam emails each day. So that's one reason why some sites use a form rather than an email. There's also another scenario where a form has an advantage. It can be filled in on any machine and doesn't rely on the user having email set up.

 

[Clive.Hornsby]

The more options a user has to contact you the better, so our opinion really doesn't matter.

Based on the fact that 'you can't keep all the people happy all the time', I will continue to have both a contact form and a clickable email link on my site.

The Spam is mostly sorted for me using VPOP3 as my mail server and I know people who route their email via Gmail to cut out the spam with the added advantage of being accessible from all devices.

 

[JElder]

Many sites don't show the email address as well as the form because they are concerned about it being "hoovered up" by hacking software that will then mean they get tonnes of spam.

True, but then most forms get spammed heavily by bots too. It's all down to whether you value your time clearing out spam more than you value making it easier for customers to contact you.

I tend to use Gmail now and it's very effective as a spam filter.

 

[Nuno]

It's all down to whether you value your time clearing out spam more than you value making it easier for customers to contact you.

Spot on.
And if spam clearing rattles your cage there are effective filtering systems on the Market, which are relatively cheap, from £25 ish a year.

 

[Jet Virtual]

Having a captcha also steers away the spam bots

 

[Nuno]

Having a hidden captcha which only bots attempt to fill is a good one. If they try they are discarded.