Does your website have a Contact Form?

It’s really a silly question. . . but does your website have a form on it’s contact page? Or did your webmaster settle for an email link?

The answer matters!

It didn’t used to matter. . . back in the 1990′s. Everyone used email software on their computer. With the exception of AOL users, of course.

But now web email is very common. In fact, Comscore reported on unique user traffic for the US only to the big four email domains in July 2009:

Yahoo! Mail attracted 106 million unique US users
Windows Live Hotmail: 47 million users
Gmail: 37 million users
AOL Mail: 36.4 million users

That’s over 226 MILLION PEOPLE who can’t use your email link, since it “points” to an email software on your computer, not on a web service!

Use a web form for your visitors to contact you

A web form is easy to create and very functional for all your website visitors.

There are three parts to the web form:

the part the web visitor sees (like the image at the right)
the email sending mechanism (including spam filters and other validation processes)
the thank you message

If your web designer only gave you a link instead of a form, ask for your money back. They were simply being lazy! And cutting out 225 million people from being able to ask you a simple question!

I’m mad about this! I’ve seen too many websites latey that only have an email contact link — no form. And the web site owner wasn’t educated enough to know that this won’t work (unless you have a time machine and go back to the mid-90′s).

Be smart and use a contact form on your website.