The contact page on your website is an important page that shouldn’t be over looked or under considered! In this article we discuss our Top 5 Tips on how to improve your contact page design:
- Responsiveness and speed
- Only use fields that you really need
- Privacy Statement
- Block spam with CAPTCHA
- Set an automatic reply system
1. Responsiveness and speed
Make sure your contact page is mobile friendly. The number of users accessing websites through mobile devices is ever growing. This means you should make sure that your contact page design is responsive, easy to navigate and intuitive to use. Another important aspect is to double check that the “page load” is as fast as it can be – you can’t expect users to wait whilst the page loads. There are different online tools that you can use to check your website’s speed such as http://www.webpagetest.org/ and http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/.
2. Only use fields that you really need
We all know how annoying it can be to fill out a long form, so bearing this in mind you should make sure that your contact form is set-up with only those fields that are necessary. Keep the form small and simple.
In most cases you will just need the following fields: Name, Email Address and Message. For the message/body text area, remember to make sure that it set-up to be scalable, so that your customers can write more if they want too, and be still be able to see what they have written.
The contact form page is also where your address and contact details should be detailed, along with a Google Map section or a Google Virtual Tour.
3. Privacy Statement
You should let your users know what you do with their personal information and therefore a privacy statement is appropriate. This policy underlines how your company uses the information that you are collecting and how it is processed. To read more on, see “The Data Protection Principles” section from this PDF: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/.
4. Block spam with CAPTCHA
Unfortunately there are bots surfing on the internet who’s sole goal is to attack websites with spam and one of their key ways in, is via the contact form. So if you are not using any secure bulk spam protection, we would suggest you set-up CAPTCHA system. If you don’t know which CAPTCHA extension to use, you could try the one provided from Google – I’m not a robot.
5. Set an automatic reply system
It’s reassuring to your customers to receive confirmation that their email has been received. Therefore, how about setting-up an automatic reply system so that once the submit button as been pressed, your website will send an email confirming receipt and other details – time frame they will be replied to/via phone/email for example.
Last but not least,don’t forget to carry out regular testing of your contact form page.
If you’d like help with your contact page design, give us a call!
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