There is always a common confusion among people or organization that creates a website. They get stuck while creating the Contact Page of the website. The choice between having an Email Address and a Contact Form is hard to make. The preference of the users differs and thus the owners have to face the dilemma. It is always better to have knowledge about anything before you choose. The problems and issues regarding both are discussed below which help you in taking your decision.
Professional aspect
Many believe adding a contact form makes the website look more professional. This is absolutely not the case. There are many visitors that believe a website is shady as it does not provide an email address. Seeing the email address they get assured about the availability of the website. They find it more secure as they can have the copy of the sent mail if they are able to send the email from their personal email providers. The email address is also saved for alter use and contact much like the phone number. But there are many who believe a contact form is of great help. It feels to them that providing a feedback is easy through a contact form is very much easy and does not involve any kind of logging into their own email ids.
Thus neither of them brings professional look to the website. It completely depends on the users who are accessing the website. The preference of every individual differs and thus the choice is also varied. If one needs to avoid chance of losing any client one should go for both contact form and email address.
The spam factor
It is supposedly believed that an email address attracts more spam. The contact forms do not have the opportunity to attract spam easily as they can be filtered by specific systems. But having an email address completely accessible for anyone gets the risk of getting tampered. The inbox gets overloaded with spam and the task of cleaning hammers the mind. Thus many adopted contact form to avoid these spam. The use of captcha would ensure that the content of the contact form is spam free. But nowadays spammers are so advanced. They have updated their bots that enables them drop spam even into contact form or the comment box of any blog. Thus neither contact form or email address can avoid spam.
For business purposes you need to go for both email address and contact form. You cannot omit the email address as that will lose many business prospects you might get. Spam protection is not important than sales. It is better to install add on facilities available in email software to reduce and filter the spam. For personal use it is the preference of the users. Have the contact form for a good feedback section. This will increase the viewers of your website. Personal website usually do not have any particular audience to attract thus the feedback is very important to make the website appealing to all kind of viewers.