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.
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