When visitors comes to your site or blog and they have a question to ask you, how would they do it? Do you have a specific page that tells them how they can contact you? Assuming that you do not wish to provide details such as address and phone numbers, do you (at least) provide an email address?
A Contact Page Is Necessary
Let’s get to the point, be it for personal or business, a site or blog needs a contact page. A site or blog exists for an audience and for the audience to be able to contact you, you need to tell them how they can do it and the means available for them to contact you.
I’m sure you have gone through this experience where you get to a site and you do not find certain information and you need to contact the site owner, you naturally look for a page with the title that looks like Contact, Contact Me or Contact Us.
For Personal Or Business
A contact page must be present in the list of all the necessary pages that has to be present on your site. Have you ever tried to buy something online and then changed your mind because you could not find any information on how to contact the seller?
This itself is enough to prove the point that a site needs a contact page. What about a personal site or a blog? Is it necessary? Ask yourself this. Do you really want to miss all that opportunity to interact with your site visitors (the very people you started the site for)?
Sure, you may say that your site is just a personal blog and if they have any questions about a blog post, they can leave it in the comments? What about other questions that they might have about your site and you that does not have anything to do with a blog post?
What To Include In A Contact Page
Now, if you do decide to create a contact page, what should be in it? It all depends a lot on what kind of entity you are, the kind of manpower available to answer your visitors or customers and the location of the target market or audience you are serving.
Here are some suggestions as to what you can include in your contact page.
- Personal
- Email address via contact form
- Business
- Email address via contact form
- Postal mail address
- Office address
- Map of the office address
- Operation hours
- Telephone and/or fax number
Refrain From Using Mailto Link
Whatever you decide to include in your contact page, I strongly suggest against adding your email address using a mailto link and it is for two very good reasons. First is to prevent spam bots from harvesting your email address and secondly is for professionalism.
A good number of Internet users nowadays use web email like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Your email address using the mailto link is more or less useless to them as they will still need to type it in a new message that they are sending you.
Use A Contact Form
A contact form will make more sense. Your visitors don’t have to log in to their web email account and they don’t have to remember or copy your email address in the To column of the email that they are sending you. All they need is to type in their name and their email address.
In case you are wondering what a contact form is, it is just a basic form on your contact page that your site visitor can fill in their name, email address and the message that they have for you. An example would be the contact form on my Contact page. Got a question for me?
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