I’m a big fan of simple. I like simple business cards, simple math, simple recipes for dinner, and I especially like simple contact forms on a website. For many people, when they visit your site, all they are looking for is a way to contact you, so make that process simple.
When this site first launched, we had a rather complex or detailed contact form. We asked for name, phone number, email address, question/message, budget for the project, services interested in, best time to contact, timeframe for starting project, timeframe for completing project, and a few others that I can’t even remember. Most of those fields were optional and only the name, email address, and question/message fields were required. But by having such an in depth form for someone looking to get some information about marketing service wasn’t needed as I could get all that extra info during the initial consultation meeting. I removed the extra fields and there was an increase in the ratio of the number of visitors to the contact page to the number of completed form submissions.
There are some instances that a more in depth form may be needed or the best option for a business, but these are not the norm. Instead K.I.S. your contact forms and Keep It Simple.