I always come from the theory that a telephone number should be visible on every page of you website (unless your business strategy doesn’t involve people contacting you:-)
A web norm is to have the number on the top right hand corner of the site, and it makes me glow whenever I see one there.
By having a telephone number clearly visible I know without thinking how to make contact. On a website that requires a process (for example an e-commerce purchasing system or online banking process), the telephone number should be visible in case a visitor encounters errors or does not know what to do next. If this occurs on an e-commerce site, the visitor is more than likely not to continue. A telephone number could be the way out.
The other day I was on one of our banking sites where we process all our Debit Orders each month. After logging in and trying to process the order I came across a problem and I needed to change some settings. I had no idea how to do this, so I searched for contact details, only to find I had to log out to get to the contact page. Once a visitor has logged in all access to contact details are lost. This frustrated me greatly, although banking sites are lucky because it is too much hassle for us to try and change to a new bank.
-Nicola
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Slow response I’m afraid (been on hols) but wanted to post on this one.
I partially agree that its good to have phone numbers because it makes potential customers feel warm but phone numbers also cause problems when trying to analyse where a client website is going right or wrong.
For example, if a website about fruit has a phone number on every page and the website statistics show that a high percentage of people exit the website from the page about apples, then does that mean that people hate the page or does it mean that they’ve seen the phone number and made contact?
Because many companies are very poor at tracking phone enquiries back to their originating source it’s difficult to sometimes determine which pages do and don’t work on a website.
In my humble experience I find that by taking the phone number OFF (not in the cases of all sites, I appreciate), provides the opportunity to get a much clearer picture of how people are flowing through the site. If people don’t see phone numbers but DO see a clear ‘Contact Us’ call to action (graphic or link) on every page in the same location then if people are exiting the site from certain pages then it usually means they don’t like the content of those pages.
So, while on the surface it seems to make sense having a phone number/email address in clear view on each page, it actually gets in the way of properly analysing where some pages are doing well or not (which is why I recommend instead having a ‘Contact Us’ type link.
I am, of course, conscious that this flies in the face of what many people believe to be right on websites but I’ve proven over and over again with clients (after running the experiement) that it’s better to have a clear view of why people move in certain ways through a website than to have the phone number etc. always in view.
That’s my tuppence worth.
Andy