Don't be the invisible person on your own website

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.