"You will get less leads with the 'enterprise style' contact page. You don't have enough leads right now. You don't have low value self-serve users you want to turn away. Your BDR team is not overflowing with leads you need to turn away. You can make money from having more leads. Less leads will generate less revenue. Here are some potential metrics from the two styles of contact pages. Here is how these metrics tie into revenue."

I think an honest message like this, at least communicated via email to the budget owners would abscond... or at least absolve one of any guilt.

Also, thank you for having the option to toggle the font. I wrote a css rule, but found it later.

Off topic but love the site design

Don't be so inconsiderate. Humans increase costs. The silicon valley oligarchs do not have enough. They need to reduce costs. Replace everyone possible with "AI". They are on the race to the first trillion after all.

Good luck trying to reach a human for support on google, one of the most rich companies in history, that permeates virtually every aspect of life.

That with its pixel art is styled so beautifully and so hard to read at the same time. Couldn't read it at all. (It's not an eye vision problem, reading pixel fonts just is quite taxing on the brain).

I agree with the author in that there are such things as "fuck off" contact pages; I deal with them often looking for hardware and software and professional services. The gating of contact behind a sales department is one method of "fucking off" a person, but so is omitting necessary contact information, gating it behind some absolutely hostile AI chat agent, or just burying the page entirely. Certain large American ISPs are very guilty of this behavior, even going so far as to make the entire process of contacting them one giant, deliberately engineered "fuck off and die" experience across literally every medium of contact (web, mail, phone call, etc.).

Though to be fair, this is a bit rich coming from a blog that I'd describe as a "fuck off blog". This was incredibly difficult to read. I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their site (I'm guilty of doing ornery things on my site because I enjoy it and the aesthetic), but I find the irony palpable.

Regarding the communicative iterations where you desperately (read: hopelessly) try to convince a client otherwise as they demand something unreasonable; 100% on-point. In my consultations with a close friend I've found that it's not only hard, but interpersonally challenging to say "no" to someone when you're either being compensated by them or in some personal relationship with them that you don't want to jeopardize. The best advice I've recieved regarding business operations is "don't do business with friends", and I imagine this kind of situation is one of the biiggest reasons why. Someone being set on a terrible idea and relying on you to implement it is not pleasant. My experience with this to date has been informal, but I'd imagine that once legal contracts are involved it becomes hair loss-tier stressful to deal with.

Udemy is famous for the fuck off style for paying customers.

very nice website !

This whole post is coming of a bit naive to me... I highly doubt this client is just an inspirational design meeting away from changing their offering and make a massive investment in customer support. I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision.

Wow, that's website theme is awesome. windows XP like, breath of nostalgia. Thank you for that !

I love this site it’s so cute and interesting

The rise of AI has a lot to do with how these pages keep inventing new ways to avoid offering real support. And along with it comes their close cousin: the “go-away” chat agent—full of useless answers and designed specifically to prevent you from reaching an actual human.

As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. I always felt it was basically reasonable. if you can direct someone to an answer without having to waste money/time/compute on provide custom service, then that seems basically reasonable to me. yes it's annoying, but it's not a pattern I've ever felt was particularly dark. I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call to fix a problem. as long as it is available somewhere

I often find myself in the bizarre situation of backing out of a suppliers website to google their contact number. A bit like when you want pricing on something without falling into a sales funnel.

I hate generic name-text-submit-forms as the only method of contact. Somehow the article makes them the definition of not a "f** off contact page" - why?

I think such forms are a direct downgrade from providing an email address.

- Responding to the submissions likely requires email anyway

- Impersonation/spam is even less difficult

- Sender isn't guaranteed to get a record of sending the message

- A faceless form with unknown machinery feels like sending messages in a bottle

Whenever I encounter one of these fuck off pages, I make a point to remove all possibility of ever purchasing anything from them.

(including you, Google).

Well good news, these days there's another layer. "Not even GPT4-level LLM" bots that frustrate you into giving up by circling to the FAQs over and over.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world - I noticed in SEA businesses are more like "just contact us" with a phone number directly available / facebook page. Like, they don't want you to do anything with the website, they expect you to chat with them directly.

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

Urgh... One of the worst things, when you want to contact someone and they have hidden every means of doing so. It reflects badly on the companies that do this and questions why such pages exist to begin with. I understand why companies hate spam, but when a company hides customer service, that should be a major red flag and reeks of cowardice. Customers can and do have major problems, not just Karen type issues, but being ripped off for hundreds or even thousands. They sometimes hide behind underpaid staff who are students or can barely speak English.

The contact page on the left is something I absolutely hate. If the prefer method of contact is email, just give me an email. If they need to enter that into some ticketing system, give me access to the ticketing system. The page on right give me some ideas how they handle things internally.

The form on left is almost certainly a webform-to-email, this is ridiculous.

looking at font choice, how ironic they are complaining about UX

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