Many websites seem to make it hard for you to contact them, sometimes in an effort to fight spam and sometimes through bad design or lack of thought.

They make you use a really complicated form that asks for the information they want, rather than what you want to give. Forms have required fields that a casual browser doesn’t need to fill in or confusing anti-spam captcha’s. Email addresses are hidden or obscured in an effort to confuse email scrappers. You can’t find the phone number or address of the company.

Many web designers, both professional and amateur, forget that everyone else doesn’t spend 10 hours a day using the internet. A lot of internet users don’t understand why you might want to protect yourself from spam and may not be great at typing. Some people don’t have the patience for forms or have a unique enquiry that a form can’t handle and want an email address, or they may just want to pick up the phone and speak to someone.

Web designers and internet marketers should make the most of the hard work involved in getting visitors to a site and make it easy to convert them. This is obviously very important if they are selling a product or service that requires potential customers to get in contact. Nothing should hinder them in any way.

So here are a few ideas.

Provide a phone number, email address and enquiry form(s). Anti spam measures should be hidden and take place in the background.

Link to a privacy policy wherever contact information is shown. Make it very clear that a user’s information will not be shared.

Don’t write email addresses in a none-email format. If you must do something, make the email address an image and encrypt the mailto: link. (And beef up your server side spam protection and the filters in your email client).

Provide multiple forms, one for casual enquiries (e.g. with only name, email and message fields) and a more detailed form for more serious enquirers (it could be linked from a product detail page) - call it an order form. Protect these forms from spam bots with server side scripting, or dummy form fields.

Try providing a form with only one field where users can submit their email or phone number so you can contact them.

An important (and easy) aspect of optimising your site for the search engines is ensuring the non-www version of a URL (http://example.com) redirects to the www version (http://www.example.com).

This is because search engines see the www and non-www versions as different pages leading to duplication issues, splitting of the power of incoming links and inaccurate web stats.

To redirect the non-www version add the following re-write condition to the Apache .htaccess file for a site (this is found in the root folder of a site):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.co\.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]</pre>