Some thoughts on how you encourage your visitors to contact you through your website and a consumers possible opinion on those methods.

Not everyone is going to be as willing to pick up the phone and dial your phone number. Having it listed on your website is obviously a smart move though because you will have those people who have nothing better to do during the day but call and speak to a live person about your services.

Not everyone will be able to click on an e-mail link. In many instances the site visitor may not have a mail client configured on their computer and only rely on free e-mail like hotmail or Gmail. If a visitor gets an install message or error message upon clicking on that e-mail link then you can count that potential client as a definite lost client. E-mails are still important to have on your site though. Some people will have an e-mail client configured so you’ll be able to reach that group of people.

So what is quick and easy to do without having your visitors picking up the phone or copy and pasting your e-mail into their free e-mail providers interface? How about a simple contact form? A contact form is quick and easy, you get to control the data inputted and no one has to install anything fancy or expensive to make it work.

Often the problem comes with the actual processing of a form. Anyone can create a contact form but telling it what to do is the difficult part unless you have a web savvy tech on hand to help you out.

I don’t have all the answers for every type of site out there. However so far I have found providers that are either incomplete, difficult to set up or update and most of them cost some kind of monthly fee. I suspect if I can find one that is fairly built up and EASY to implement then I’d be all for making a suggestion.

For all of you who are techie or just simply want some idea’s on web forms, I would recommend you checking out Jason Bartholme’s 101 Resources to Help You Build a Better Web Form. This was a good enough resource that I Dugg the article and submitted a Sphinn submission myself.