Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

You have to work and making changes to discover the best form for a Contact page

The internet has changed many things about how we do business. Many potential customers do not want to contact us by phone. They would rather email us or fill out a form on our site. I believed that I had to find a way to lure the prospect to call me, so I could try to make the sale. The problem lies with the fact that the internet makes it easier for a user to window shop, and such an expectation includes wanting to know the price of things.

There are users who do not want to email, fill in a form, or read the information on the contact page. On this site, I make it easy for them. Look at the header. You have my name, a brief description of what I am offering/do, and my phone number. Adding the phone number not only lets the prospect have a means to contact me, it adds a level of trust to the site. Trust on the internet is a big deal, because anyone could put up a site. Part of optimizing your site for a search engine is finding ways to show that a user can trust you. For another example of this kind of contact information, go to my home inspection site and look at the top of the sidebar on the right. There you will find a mission statement and various means to contact me. I may place a similar paragraph on this site.

I have written various types of Contact pages. It might seem simple, but the contact page could be the page that makes the sale. You know your sales method best, so you need to see if it can be incorporated into this page. Sometimes a brief bio may help make the sale. A sales pitch could be the opening paragraph. I came to the conclusion that having a description of my services with prices was a wise idea for my home inspections, because many people do not understand what the service entails or what to expect in price. Listing my price was mentally a hard step for me, but this came down to another level of building trust. Internet users frequently want more data when searching for a firm than they would using a phone book. Pricing is one bit of data they may require to make that sale. I found that they still call for a price, even though they saw the price listed on the site. Take some time to study the contact us page of your competitors. If they are doing something, like listing prices, it may be a wise idea for you.

Where to place elements on this page. If you go to look at the contact page for this site, you will notice a spartan page. The opening paragraph states where to find contact information, and how to email me. Notice that I did not write the email in the standard form, but I wrote out the words for the symbols. There are programs harvesting email to send you spam; this is one step to prevent them from discovering your email. To cut down on spam, I use the form method. This does not fully prevent spam, but it helps. There are various plugins for WordPress to help you create a form. It is not to difficult to write out the code for this task, but these plugins do keep up with the latest coding standards, and they are easy to use. My current favorite is “Contact Form 7”. Other plugins can create more involved graphics, but the interface to create a form is easy to use, and installing it on the page could not be simpler. Go to the plugin homepage to download it and to see its features. When you have created a form, this is a bit of script that you copy into your page where you want the form to be placed. I positioned the form underneath the brief opener, because many people want to contact you, but they do not want to wade through the page trying to discover how they can do that. Does the opener have to be so short? No. You could place the form first if you want a longer paragraph, or you could flesh out the paragraph more. Think of it as trying to sell your service in a couple of minutes. What would you say?

I list my services below the opener and the form. The services that you provide can produce a long list, and a user may become impatient, leaving the site. If my services are not too complex listing them below the form is not a bad idea; however there is another solution to presenting data to a potential client while keeping others from leaving a site: creating more pages. WordPress allows you to designate a page as a “parent” then other pages can be connected to it. This is great if you have a multi-stage drop down menu in your navigation. My method deals with what a visitor will see when coming to your contact page. Have your opening paragraph, then you can present links to the pages which go into more detail about part of your service. Below these links you could place the form. Visitors who want that information can see where to find it, while those who do not want to scroll through it can find the contact form quickly.

My best advice is find ways to keep your contact page simple. Too much or too little data can leave the visitor confused. Experiment with different pieces of text. Setting it and forgetting it should not be an option with any page. As your business and the website evolve, so should the pages.

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