Forms are useful in many ways on a website. Perhaps the most critical is the need to use a contact form on your website instead of providing an email address. Broadcasting your email address to your customers may appear to be a good idea however, the downside is that they can and will, be picked up by spam bots and businesses that who collect email addresses. Spam bots will send junk mail to you and, in many cases, try to attack your website server.
The approach we recommend is using a form such as you’ll see on our site, in which you invite the visitor to enter their details, hit the button and an email gets sent directly to you as a result. The visitor gets confirmation that this has happened. In this way, you’re not advertising your address but you’re still maintaining that touch-point with your customers.
Forms can be setup in a whole variety of ways, and you can see a simple example on our contact page.
There are many ways in which forms can also help the administrative side of your business e.g. you can ask people completing your contact form to indicate the nature of their enquiry from a drop-down list. The email then goes to the appropriate person in your business depending on the nature of your enquiry rather than them all going to one email address you can see an example of this on the contact page for the Retired Working Dogs website.
The other great advantage of using a contact form is that a report can be generated showing who has been in touch with you and you can make sure that they have all been followed up.
