Users like to know who the company or the people behind a site are. Contact information is very important in that it constitutes a link between the user and the company or person behind the site. Sites that offer no or incomplete contact information give a lot of users the impression they want to hide their identity and hence make a less than trustworthy impression. Therefore, a clearly visible link to a page with full contact information is no luxury.

Easily accessible 
Include the link to the contact information as one of the last items in the navigation and make sure you put the navigation on every page. That way, you insure there's a clearly visible link to the contact information on every page, which is very important because you can never tell when a user may want to contact the site. Users don't like confusing terms or cryptic descriptions so don't get creative but stick to the standard terms like 'Contact' or 'Contact us'. These are not just short terms that are easy to understand and leave little to the imagination, they are also the most widely used terms and therefore easily recognized by users.

Provide different kinds of contact information
Users who want to contact a web site, may want to do that in a number of different ways. Some users want to send an e-mail, others may want to phone the site or send something by registered post. Don't limit users and make sure your contact information includes all these possibilities. Contact information should minimally consist of an off line address, a landline phone number and an e-mail address. A fax number and a contact form are optional. If there are certain people within your organisation that occupy themselves with customer service, provide their names as well, so users know who to get in touch with. Don't try users' patience by spreading out the contact information over different pages but put everything on one page. When users click on a link that is called 'Contact us', they expect to see a page that provides the information to contact the site, not a series of links.

Contact forms 
A lot of sites offer a form as the only way of contacting the site. Often, these forms are limited by a number of fields or lists. For the firm behind the site these forms can certainly be useful, but users don't like them. The anonymity and complexity of the forms scares a lot of users. On the Philips site, users have to select the subject they wish to communicate to the site about from a dropdown, while yet another dropdown further specifies the chosen subject. Philips leaves it up to the user to figure out which department to direct his question to. That isn't always very easy for users. And it isn't very customer oriented either.

Els Aerts & Karl Gilis

A more in depth version of this article has appeared in Tips & Advies Oenine Ondernemen, year 5, number 16 (Belgium and the Netherlands).