Poor website contact details hamper businesses, developer warns
Poor website contact details hamper businesses when their website contact details are letting them down.
That’s the view of leading website developer Martin Jarvis. Martin heads up Swindon-based DMJ Computer Services, specialising in WordPress website design, hosting and aftercare.
Problem Areas
When Martin and his team visited dozens of websites as part of a marketing exercise, one thing in particular struck them. That was the high level of issues they found in making contact with the websites’ owners. And all down to contact details being either incorrect or not fit for purpose.
Problems identified included:
- Contact forms that failed to submit
- Captchas that were impossible to complete
- Mistyped, bouncing email addresses
- Demanding so much information from an initial enquiry that the process was off-putting
“It’s hard enough for website owners to encourage visitors to get in touch with them at the best of times. Let alone during periods of great economic disruption, as we are in now,” said Martin.
“A primary goal of most websites is to persuade potential clients to make contact. A typical way to achieve that is through a combination of the following:
a. Contact forms
b. Comment forms
c. Email addresses and telephone numbers.
If it’s not clear to a visitor how to make contact, or if the methods don’t work, then such websites are ineffective.
What does Martin advise?
Martin’s advice for improving contact details includes simple steps:
a. Check often that contact forms submit as they should and arrive at their destination and
b. that email addresses are correct.
Other measures include:
a. Having clickable email addresses and telephone numbers so visitors don’t have to copy and paste them into their email client.
b. Installing invisible Captcha – which does everything in the background to avoid inconveniencing website visitors
c. Using other anti-spam measures for contact forms.
Martin added:
“We often install live chat on websites. They’re a good way to allow visitors to engage in conversation whilst browsing. The chat box sits quietly in the bottom corner of the web browser, and visitors can click it to start a conversation. Of course, it’s only a benefit to have a live chat feature if you:
a. Monitor it often and …
B. …respond quickly to queries.
Having an unmonitored chat box may well annoy site visitors.”
DMJ is offering to carry out a short, free review of website contact details.
For more about this and other DMJ services, including a chat box installation and monitoring service, visit https://dmjcomputerservices.com/, email martinj@dmjcomputerservices.com, or call 01793 740964.
See also from Martin Jarvis:
