One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to pay a lot of money for a website but then hide your contact details away.

This is a shortened version of the full article about making sure your contact details are clear, which you can read here.

Your phone number should be a clear beacon, immediately visible above the fold (preferably at the top of the page) in large font that can be read even by those who are partially sighted. Especially by those who are partially sighted. They are the ones who need it most as they will find it frustrating to browse the website.

You should offer an email address and get a decent junk mail filter to deal with the spam that is inevitable from publishing an email address on the internet. You can also take steps to obfuscate your email address from robot crawlers. Not offering an email address because you're afraid of spam is like slamming your door in people's faces. Not good.

And you should also have an enquiry form on the contact page (or even at the side of all pages), as some people prefer having the guidance of little boxes to fill in, because they don't want to expend the brain power involved in composing an email from scratch. And who are you to argue?

And finally, you could offer an online chat service but you need to be careful with this or it could do more harm than good. If it's constantly unavailable, or if the people take ages to reply (possibly because they're trying to deal with too many chats at the same time) and leave your customer sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a response, or if your customer service agents are impolite or abrupt, then your customers will be turned off.

By utilising all these methods (effectively), you give people every option they could desire and reduce the likelihood of them getting turned off and heading to one of your competitors instead.

If you liked this blog post, you might like to read our article on Five elements of great web design or web design and colour.

Sentiva web design make websites, software and mobile apps.

A few years ago I visited India, and discovered a country rich with culture, diversity and colour. I'm glad I saw the breathtaking beauty and worrying filth of it first hand, becasue I wouldn't want my entire view of the country to be based on my experience with the prolific and relentless Indian web outsourcing companies.

Note - this is a shortened version of the full article, which you can read here on our website.

Some UK based web design companies outsource their coding to India, and some clients may even decide to go directly there. However, in our experience, there are many problems that arise with this way of working - that cost far more than the discount benefits.

The first and foremost is the communication problem. I don't demand that everyone I deal with, whether it's business to business or as a consumer, has to have English as their first language. However, I do expect that they have a decent command of the language I'm using if they want to work with me. If I plan to market my products in Germany or Spain, I'll damn well make sure I learn German or Spanish well enough to get my point across.

Unfortunately, with these outsource centres, this is rarely the case. All our communication with them, (when we've tested their services, out of curiosity) have been painful and frustrating, involving circular conversations that achieve nothing, and email volleys that are more confusing than a cryptic crossword.

On top of that, the quality of work we've seen is shoddy and unprofessional, and not anything we'd be willing to put our name to.

I'd like to strongly make the point here that I have no doubt that there are plenty of Indian professionals that speak impeccable English and write beautiful code - however, my guess is that they are working decently paid jobs for reputable companies. The people hired by the majority of the outsource centres are code monkeys with the most basic knowledge, no sense of the bigger picture and minimal English. Because those people will be cheap, and that helps you get your cheap prices.

So, we don't outsource any of our work to underpaid workers, and we consider good communication paramount and not negotiable. Plus, we care about writing elegant, robust code.

You can read more articles about web design, SEO and the like in our resource bank.

Or you can read more about our web design service - including a sexy infographic of the process, here.