In a recent question I posted that one of my favourite patterns for a contact form was to sit it in a fat footer so that it was present on every page. (Edit - This does not have to be a ploy to hide the email address which can be posted elsewhere on the site e.g. top right. It is simply a way to encourage users to contact the website owner.).
Matt Lavoie commented that:
As an aside, contact forms like this drive me crazy. First, if something goes wrong I will never know, whereas if an email bounces that I sent from my account I will receive that error. Secondly, responses from forms like this almost always end up in my spam folder, where as if I sent the email to begin with it would just fall right into the email chain between me and whoever.
There must be ways to design around this issue.
If a contact form automatically cc'ed the user and sent a confirmation that it had arrived would that cover it?
Given that these forms suit low level users and are now becoming very easy to put into any wordpress website (via a simple point an click WYSIWIG editor) what should best practice be?
Answer
I use this pattern a lot myself. I almost always also provide a conventional email address for people who prefer to have a record of their enquiry in their sent items or for other reasons. Nonetheless, these forms tend to get a bunch more use than the plain email address (at least for general enquiries) in my experience.
One important thing I almost always do is store the received enquiries in the CMS database for searching and as a much more robust alternative to email. That's got me out of trouble numerous times.
One thing regarding the design of the form itself: sometimes we've seen success by giving the user the chance to either enter a message or select "Get back to me" and a tel field or an email address field.
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