[Theforum] evolt-ia: contact pages

[Madhu Menon]

At 02:50 AM 1/18/2002, aardvark was saying:
>to date, we've had pretty good responses on bugs in a pretty timely
>fashion... i'd say we're doing well...
>
>if we can be sure a new form will make it even better, then it's a no-
>brainer...

I've brought this up before, and offered a suggestion, but here it is again 
anyway.

We already have a field for email address and feedback. To make our contact 
form all-inclusive, we just have to add either a dropdown or a few radio 
buttons that ask "what is this message about?" (or something like that).

Examples:

CNET's contact page: 
http://www.cnet.com/cnetsupport/contact/1,10161,0-3945,00.html

CIOL.com contact page: http://www.ciol.com/company/contact/
(I created this 3 years ago. The management screwed the design later, 
unfortunately.)

In the second example, my server-side script would automatically route the 
mail to the correct email address based on the subject. For example, 
"Business enquiries" would go to the BizDev team, "Just a suggestion" would 
go to the entire tech and content teams, "Problem with the CIOL web site" 
would come directly to me, and "Comment about an article on CIOL" would go 
to the content editor.

We could do something similar. A "suggestion" could come to theforum as 
well, while "list problems" could go to admin. Just a thought.

See, there's really no need for 10 different contact forms when one will 
serve the purpose just fine.

I welcome any comments.

Regards,

Madhu

<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net