What’s the first thing I do when I visit a new website? I try the contact page. You can tell a lot about a company by the quality of their contact page.

Today’s test is the revised home page for toriamos.com, and in particular the e-mail list signup. I know it’s not a contact form, but I’m still gonna test it.

• Put some rubbish text in to the e-mail address, click Submit. Say hello to the nasty red error message.
• Leave all the fields blank, click Submit. It works.

Now, this kind of behaviour might be okay for a site promoting a musician, but it certainly wouldn’t be for a business website because this behaviour reflects on the business. I always used to wonder why my secondary school used to get so uppity about its pupils misbehaving – or indeed not wearing school uniform properly – outside of school. This is why.

We don’t have a contact form for our website. Actually, we don’t really have a website at present, but when we get ours up, it won’t have a contact form. Just an address, phone numbers and e-mail address. What more do people need? Why replace perfectly good contact mechanisms with a bloody form that pretty much does the same thing? Unless a customer explicitly asks for a contact form, we don’t provide one.

Ah, but suppose you want to ask questions? Well, you shouldn’t. Questions block the start of a conversation.

What if you want to know your target market? Well, you should know your market before you start a business, and certainly before the establishment of a website.