Thinking About the Web Site Contact Form

In general, we have just a few strong recommendations about web site contact forms:

  • Keep it short.
  • Provide some sort of brief explanation of response time and/or format.
  • Use something to keep the spam down.

And you’ll see we do this all on our own site.

But recently I’ve been thinking about this post which is about using narrative web forms. It’s about providing a more natural conversational form, rather than the data collection form evolved from the print world, in order to improve the performance of the form – the conversion of a visitor to your form page to the actual information you are looking to garner.

For contact forms, I’m not sure it matters nearly as much – but still, we recently added just a bit of narrative to it so it wouldn’t seem so stark.

If you’re looking for some narrative for your contact page, take a look around at organizations similar to yours, both in your area and in other states, using Google.  You’ll undoubtedly find a few that you appreciate for both helpfulness and succinctness.  Let those pages help you form your own narrative.