Creating a Contact Us Page

All websites should have clear instructions on how the visitor can contact you.

 Most Web based businesses have only a email contact. However you can greatly increase your credibility by including additional contact details especially when you are selling items online.

Brick and mortar based businesses will always have additional possibilities such as telephone, Fax and Postal address.

Contact Possibilities

The main mechanisms used for contacting a website/business owner are:

• Phone number
• Mobile Phone number
• Fax number
• Postal Address
• Email Address
• IM (instant messenger address)
• Direct chat from website

and I would recommend you use all that are appropriate.

Addresses and Spam/Junk Mail

Junk mail started in the snail mail world and spread to the email world. Most are aware of the need to protect their email address from would be spammers (see hide email address), the same is also true of other contact details.

The easiest way of protecting these details is to include them as part of a graphic and not as text on the web page.

So instead of:

Tel 01952xxxx

you use:

It looks the same but the bottom one is a gif image and the top one is text. You will see it if you try to copy the telephone numbers.

Because the spam spiders cannot read the image your telephone number remains protected but is easily read by your visitor.

Creating the image can be done in any graphics program.  Microsoft paint will do the job just fine. Just remember to save it as a gif file.

Where to Include Contact Details

A common mistake many new website owners is to include them on every page as text. Not only does this give you a spam problem but if the details change then several pages need changing.

Therefore always use a single main contact page and link to it from each page. Under no circumstances use plain text for contact details always put them in an image.

There is nothing wrong in including mini contact details as part of a logo/header graphic on each page. because it is a graphic, a single change affects all pages.

By mini details I mean that it includes just the email and telephone number but not the postal address.

Email Address Contact

Because this is by far the most common mechanism used on websites almost all sites have some automated way of doing it. The visitor just clicks a link and fills in a form/email.

There are two main methods for doing this which we look at in  contact mechanisms including how to protect your contact address/form from spam.

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