Stockgrove Brickhill Systems

Contact forms offer a simple way of letting visitors to your website establish communication with you.

Contact forms can be created using standard HTML code but care needs to be taken in their use:

• Make sure you get the responders contact details if you need to get back to them but bear in mind a lot of people are reluctant to give their email address and even more so their telephone number.  To ease their anxiety, you should have a well defined privacy policy where you should spell out the care you will take with their details and promise not to share or sell their details on.
• Validate fields on your form and give appropriate polite error messages where appropriate.
• Give the visitor confirmation that their request has been received.
• When you receive a response from a contact form, endeavour to reply to the inquirer as soon as you can.
• Any scumbag can write a program that finds, completes and submits a form automatically (and many of them do).  This can mean you receive lots of rubbish about cheap fake watches, medical supplies and dodgy financial products.  Adding a CAPTCHA will nip these in the bud.  These usually take the form of asking the visitor to enter a number displayed to them on the screen or answering a simple question.
• Similarly, email addresses can be harvested from webpages.  Avoid sending a form direct to your email address as this value can be picked up out of the page (without even submitting the form).

If you are running a Wordpress website then the best way to create and manage contact forms is by using the Contact Form plugin.  You can get more information here (opens in new window).