The Benefits of using a Contact Form

If you have visited a lot of websites, at some point you likely saw a site that had a contact form.  A contact form is basically just a series of questions filled out by your visitor that is automatically sent to your email when it is filled out.  For example:

There are many different ways to use the contact form:

• General Feedback - A contact form can just be used for general comments about your website
• Service Request - If you have a business that sells a service, visitors can use the form to request your services, ask for price quotes, and more
• Questions - You can use a contact form so visitors can ask you questions while providing their preferred contact information

There are lots of benefits of using a contact form, including:

• Less spam - Spam can still get through a contact form, however a contact form is much safer then having an actual email address on your website
• You have control over what the visitor provides - If you want certain information from the customer, for example a phone number or the state they are from, you can set up the form to ask the exact questions you want so you get the information you need
• Makes replies consistent - When the contact form is used every response you get will be the same, which will make it easier to read and understand

Setting up a contact form can be more advanced as it does require using php or perl.  In the next few sections we provide more information about contact forms and how to add them to your website with FormMail (a popular form script). This information is most for users who are either hand coding their pages or using an editor such as Dreamweaver to build their website.

If you are using either a Content Management System such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, the easiest way to include a contact form on your site will be by using a plugin/module to add that functionality. We have an article for WordPress users that will walk you through setting up a contact form in WordPress using the Contact Form 7 plugin.

If you are using the Premium Website Builder to create your site, please see our article on Creating a Feedback Form in Premium Website Builder.