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When putting contact data on a page, do you use email and website separately or do you just go with the assumption that the user will get the website from the email (given that it's @relevantdomain.com).

I personally chose to just go with the email since I thought showing the domain twice (especially with a long domain name) would be redundant.

Also, does the length of the url change anything about your decision?

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Generally, showing both is a good move, because not everyone will easily be able to workout the site address from the email, and they might be different.

The length of the domain does not really impact this, I don;t think - you have to display it once on the business card, so a second time - often directly underneath - should be fine.

Is it necessary? No, but it provides a easy and clear extra comfort to present the site name. As with some areas of UX, providing more to make it easier is often better.

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  • Agreed. Make it clear which is which - an email and web address are used for different purposes
    – Peter
    Jun 28, 2012 at 13:14
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The way your question is worded I am assuming this is just to display and not for user input. Well, that being the case you could try to pull off a something clever and steal an idea from this fellow if you really don't want the repetition of "mysite.com" repeated for the domain and email.

Here is the image from the link:

enter image description here

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  • +1 like it... but would be even better if we could see the image in the answer (:
    – Lisa Tweedie
    Jun 28, 2012 at 14:40
  • +1 Love this "stolen" idea because of it's simplicity and novelty
    – JeroenEijkhof
    Jun 28, 2012 at 16:34
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    It's a nice fun approach, and on the right type of site may work really well, but I wouldn't recommend you use this on a banking or legal website for example. It takes too much thought to figure out what it means.
    – JonW ♦
    Jun 28, 2012 at 16:42
  • Yea, I agree with @JonW, a little confusing especially to non-savvy users
    – rickyduck
    Jun 29, 2012 at 10:17
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Definitely display both... there are many people out there who don't understand the link between domain names and email addresses. And anyway as Steve Krug would say "don't make me think" just give the user quick direct access to the information.

The other thought is to put a contact form on the contact page or one of my favourites directly in the footer... meaning that you don't have to show the email address and it is accessible from everywhere.

No the length of the URL does not change my decision

mockup

download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups

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  • 2
    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.
    – Matt Lavoie
    Jun 28, 2012 at 13:50
  • Interesting point ... have turned it into a question... hope you don't mind! ux.stackexchange.com/q/23022/15475
    – Lisa Tweedie
    Jun 29, 2012 at 8:38
  • I agree with Lisa, I'm always using the logo top left and contact bottom right, sometimes with another contact within the home page to direct attention to it in case the user never scrolls to the bottom
    – rickyduck
    Jun 29, 2012 at 10:18
  • There is no reason why you can't have both email and contact form. Oh yes and I always put the phone number top right.
    – Lisa Tweedie
    Jun 29, 2012 at 12:28
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I see no benefit to not showing the full email and the full URL.

The main reason for this is that you don't know what each user is wanting them for.

  • If they want to copy the URL to their clipboard then they shouldn't have to figure out what the URL is supposed to be (even if that only takes 0.05 seconds to mentally process) as they're using a copy&paste to do it.
  • They may have an email plugin in their browser so that when an email is displayed clicking on it will open their email client. Again, you don't want them to have to manually figure out the address and type it in themselves.

Do you have an actual reason why you don't want to show that information to them?

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Building on the answer from Matt Lavoie:

mockup

download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups

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  • The checkboxes need to be labeled somehow...
    – Lisa Tweedie
    Jun 28, 2012 at 21:00
  • Replace the boxes with logo's for email, web and twitter, and you're in business... Question is, how do you actually click one of those? What happens if you just click the [email protected] before you have hovered one of the items.
    – André
    Jun 29, 2012 at 14:42
  • @LisaTweedie, well i think icons are the right way to go.
    – JeroenEijkhof
    Jun 29, 2012 at 19:38
  • @André, I would add the icons if I had the graphics. So little time ... :) I don't think the text should be clickable only the icons. Maybe after hover the text just stays the way it is, unless another icon is hovered over
    – JeroenEijkhof
    Jun 29, 2012 at 19:38
  • icons, graphics, labels whatever (:
    – Lisa Tweedie
    Jun 29, 2012 at 21:04
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Show both.

If a user is not "internetally" sophisticated, they don't know what a domain name is. An email has the @ thing. A website has a www thing. There's a conceptual gap we nerds take for granted.

If a user is sophisticated, consider that they still just want to click on something to get to your site. Don't add barriers in the name of aesthetics - they'll get misinterpreted. For instance, I use Google apps to host my email using my name as my domain. There's no web site behind it.

So I might think you don't have a website. If I can assume there is a site I should visit, I'd question why there's no link. Are we paying by the byte here? Suppose I'm on a phone or tablet - copy, paste, edit is still a much more labour-intensive process than on a desktop. Having to go through a bunch of long presses and app swapping because I wasn't given a link has already started to annoy me, and heaven forbid I make a subtle typo.

I see where you're coming from, though. If your domain name is long or looks a little funny when stacked vertically with the domain as part of an email address, consider replacing the URL with an HTML link with simple text like "My web site". This does, unfortunately, not work for users using plain text email clients.

As with Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think principle, I think we should also consider that to mean Don't Make Me Work.

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Display both (or all three if you include twitter) and don't just list them, but make sure the links are correct on the page - this will help your users and SEO as well, and doesn't rely on the users browser plugins i.e I would recommend it be: 

Website: <a href="http://relevantdomain.com">relevantdomain.com<a/>
Email: <a href="mailto://[email protected]">[email protected]<a/>
Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/relevantdomain">@relevantdomain<a/>
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