Old School Web Design: A "Contact" Page

Is there anything more inexplicable about a business website than being unable to find contact information?

You're interested, ready to buy, or simply want more information, but ...you can't find the email address, street address, or phone number!

Which is because it's been stuck on a page all by itself somewhere else on the site. Not a shred of contact information anywhere except that one page.

This is another classic design mistake that heralds back to the days when graphic designers were told to make websites, and sought to create as many pages as possible from a slim amount of information.

It seems like an extension of the website-as-brochure mindset from the early days. Maybe graphic designers were so used to putting contact information only on the back of a flyer they figured it would only have one place on a website as well.

But it's more helpful to think of web pages in terms of a letterhead, where there should be essential information at your fingertips at all times. A visitor should be able to call a business or send an email from whatever page they happen to be on, instead of having to wander off to a separate part of the site. That breaks how visitors naturally move around a website, and demands they take at least one extra step just to get in touch... and probably moves them away from what got them interested in the first place!

In fairness, a contact page isn’t pointless in every case, just misused on a grand scale. If you have 35 offices, then yes, a contact page is appropriate, but at least a head office or 1-800 number should still appear on every page.

Just like the "enter" or "splash" page, never make your visitors jump through a hoop to do something as basic as contacting you.

Some Sites Are Irritating On Laptops

Web sites should be designed so they are easy to use on all browsers, on all platforms, at all resolutions. But many sites are very irritating to use on a laptop.

The biggest problem is wasted space at the top of a page. A good example of this is mapquest.com vs. maps.google.com.

Along the very top, Google maps has a small line of text links and the search box, and about 3/4 of the page is a map. No scrolling required. Brilliant, since that's why you go to a map site, right?

On the other hand, I see nothing on Mapquest other than their huge logo and buttons across the top, some links that take you off the map page, several search boxes, and the top inch of a map. Plus a massive ad to the right, which literally takes up a quarter of the screen. So I type a location, but when the result comes up, I have to scroll down to see the map. Then scroll back up to search again. Then scroll back down. This wouldn't matter on a home computer, with a mouse and bigger monitor, but when I'm using my laptop in a car or other awkward place (the only reason I ever got a laptop), I don't have time to screw around scrolling up and down for no good reason. I'm not lounging around on a couch like some college kid. I want the map.

Another problem with some sites is when you have a page you sign into, and the cursor is NOT automatically in the text box. So you have to click the cursor into the box before you can type anything. Go to Twitter or Facebook and the cursor is waiting for you in the sign-in box. But go to Compete.com and there's no cursor at all. This site has 3 boxes where you type sites to compare, but no cursor anywhere. Pressing the TAB key does nothing, the cursor simply doesn't exist until you click within a text box. This can be solved with one line of code.

Now the unfortunate part of all this... I noticed that some sites I've built are pretty irritating to use on a laptop as well. When designing sites on a 22" monitor, it's easy to get lost in that environment and forget that few people have such a big display.

I went back through all the sites I've built over the past few years and reconsidered some things. I got thinking - how many visitors would be using laptops? This might vary depending on the site, and analytics show it's a small percentage of visitors, but I decided to err on the side of caution and make some simple changes.

I changed some sites so the header area was smaller, and more useful content was shown immediately. I made some text bigger, some smaller. Some navigation buttons were moved. Navigation buttons that work better down the left side are now nearer the top and visible without scrolling. These changes made a few sites easier to use on a laptop, but they also made them cleaner and more immediately useful on any size monitor. If you are a designer, I encourage you to use a small laptop display in your development, it's a good tool to help keep sites as simple and useful as possible for the end user.