Visitor Interaction
One of the main concerns when designing a business orientated website, is the
need to ensure that your customers can contact you either with orders, feedback
or queries. This can be utilised to improve your website by ascertaining
which aspects customers are regularly having problems with (such as finding
specific items).
It is imperative that you give consideration to customer
liaison and provide sufficient resources to deal with queries in order to
provide visitors to your website with the reassurance that they are valued and
that you can be trusted as a company.
You must at least include your email address and contact details on your
website - you might also want to provide a guestbook. This can be done quite easily, although you may find
that leaving your email address on your website will lead to you receiving a
large amount of spam emails which may mask actual customer queries. There are
however various tricks to avoid your email address being collected by spam
agents - for example, using a graphic representation of it.
However, please remember that there are rules about what contact information
must be disclosed by businesses, including the registered office address and
company number if you are a limited company. These rules are covered in
our advice pages on
website design.
 One
of the easiest forms of direct visitor interaction which we have found has been
to add the ability to our websites for customers to contact us via MSN Messenger
- this reinforces to potential customers that they are dealing with real people
and lets you create a rapport with your visitors. If you envisage a lot of
customers needing this type of interaction (for example, for technical support
queries), then you may wish to investigate the possibility of a full
customer support option, such as
BoldChat's
free live chat option.
Not everyone wants to talk to you directly - it is
therefore essential that you consider adding a feedback / query form on your website which visitors can
complete. Once they hit the submit button, the details are emailed
direct to a specific department within your company. Forms should be
simply laid out and provide the visitor with all of the options which they may
need. You will therefore have to carefully plan the information which you
are going to request in a form, and we would highly recommend that you arrange
for the form to be proof-read and tested before
going live, since a small error may leave your customers confused, or worse, may
leave them with the impression that they are not dealing with a professional
organisation.
Finally, your visitors may just like to share their
experiences with other potential customers, rather than contacting you directly.
This is where a guestbook can be useful.
Adding Forms to Your Website
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Adding a form to a website appears at first glance to be easy but as you browse
the internet, you will find that not many websites actually encompass a form -
wonder why? Many
website design tools (such as Microsoft's FrontPage) include various templates
for adding forms to a web page, however, they do not provide the programming
which needs to sit behind the actual page on which the form appears.
You may want to avoid this problem, by providing a form which can be printed out
and posted back to you, or which can be filled in and emailed back to you -
however, the problem over this is not just the time it takes and fact that
people may not be bothered to go to this effort. The problem is control
over what information is provided when the form is completed.
In any case, careful consideration has to be given to the layout of the form and
the information requested, so that you do not have to go back to people to ask
for more information - the better the layout and the more intuitive the form,
the more likely it is that people are going to fill it in.
Our programming team are able to assist with both the
design of your forms and creation of the code to verify the data entered and
process the form. Data can be returned as part of an email to a specific
department within your company, or added to a database on your website.
You may also want to create a set of graphics (such as a Turing number) to act
as a check that the form is being completed by a real We could even host the
program for you if your website host does not provide this service.
Adding Visitor Guestbooks
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We
have created a simple guestbook system, which retains various
useful intelligent elements to enhance those normally available on the internet.
Our Guest books include a maintenance
routine which runs every few days and checks on all current entries within the
guestbook. If requested, the
maintenance routines will then automatically delete any entries within the
guestbook which are older than a specified number of days.
The guestbook owner is also able to specify the minimum number of
entries which should be left in the guestbook by the maintenance
routine. Email addresses entered into the guestbook
can be collated
in a separate file, ready for use by the guestbook owner
for mailshots and also the ability to opt
for filters to remove swear words from guestbook entries.
We invite suggestions on further filters which you would like to
see implemented. Guestbook owners can now
log-in
and send mailshots to people who have left their email addresses
in the guestbook.
Email addresses of people adding to the
guestbook can also be hidden, allowing contact only through the
website owner, which, for example, could be used for selling
second hand items where the website owner wants a commission on
any sale.
Our
guestbook can be easily added to any website, with the HTML
provided and work even from within the AOL browser which masks the
address of the referring page from the Perl script..
Additionally, we can add more functionality to your guestbook as
required -
new entries in the guest book can be emailed to
the guest book owner, which enables you to respond to any queries which may be
left inadvertently by customers, or even delete offensive or spam entries as
soon as they are added. We can also add a turing number to the "Add New
Comment" page to prevent entries being added by automatic software. |
