The Contact Us Page
If you are not quite sure what you should have on your Contact Us page then take at least this one piece of advice if nothing else - “keep it simple.” The online world has moved away from listing email addresses to contact certain people, rather has moved towards having a form to fill out that sends an email to the desired company or person(s).
People want to access information as easy as possible, so whatever you do, make sure people coming to your site can access the contact page easily. Many companies include a Contact link in their footer on every page.
The look and feel of a contact us page can vary but make sure there are no more than 2 images on this page. Clean, simple, and “tell me exactly what I need to do to contact you” usability. You should also make sure that you have some options for the user to choose from so you have an idea of what the user wants even before you read the email. Having a subject drop down menu with pre-filled options is a great way to save you some time. This way you could have all subjects that have “support” filled in going to a certain person in your company, and another with the subject “pricing” going to another.
An innovative touch to a contact us page could be including the iPhone as a background, and having the user type the email message into the iPhone and hit the send button to send the email. People love innovative ideas that are current and integrating something like this into your site can be the difference in someone coming back to your site or not.
No matter what you decide to do with your contact page make sure it works before you release anything to the public. Send yourself several emails and sign up for emails that Yahoo and Google give away for free to test with. If your emails are going to people’s junk folders then you have yourself a problem. Add yourself to the safe list in all the emails that get sent to your junk folder if this happens.
The last thing that is optional but will help with spam getting into your inbox is captcha. It may sound weird but its basically a box for the user to fill in to make sure its a person sending a message and not a script that some spammer has sent to a zillion domains.
If you want an example of a free template you can try this one. It has pretty much everything you will need to get started. Of course designing it will take some extra effort.
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