Everyone who visits a website is trying to complete a task, and one of the most common tasks is communication. Who do I need to contact? And how do I contact them?

Websites come in all shapes and sizes but the one thing they all have in common (well, 99.9 per cent of them) is some sort of contact details for the person, company or organisation which runs the website. A few websites have no contact details or only allow users to contact the website maintainer about technical matters. Those are bad websites.

Sometimes there is a single point of contact, but sometimes a site offers the contact details of several, perhaps many, staff/members. This is where many sites fall down because they think about this list as merely the people around them, rather than considering how the list will be used by site visitors.

When I worked for a regional arts quango, EMA, we went from a single external phone number to direct dial numbers for all forty or so staff. I recalled a time when an animation company I knew had posted me a sheet of paper with all their direct dial numbers on it and realised that something similar was required here.

There was just enough room to list all members of staff on one side of A4, with a note of general contact details too, so I produced a double sided sheet. One side listed everyone alphabetically by surname, the Chief Exec mixed in with the Admin Assistants. The other side listed everyone alphabetically by job title, taking care to make slight adjustments so that the person who was technically our 'Assistant Officer, Literature' was called 'Literature Assistant Officer' and thereby listed with the 'Literature Officer.' On the grounds that someone wanting to know about literature will look under L, not A.

Some of my colleagues (and bosses) queried this, asking why the list was not organised by department. We had four departments, none of them with a clear, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin name. For example, although we were the 'Arts Board', only a quarter of our staff worked in the 'Arts Department' - which did not include the Public Art Officer even though she was one of the few staff with the word 'art' in her job title.

The point here is that people wanting to contact an organisation usually don't have full details of who they want to speak to. If they did, they would just look them up in their address book or on their PDA and wouldn't bother coming to the website. Arranging the EMA direct dial phone list by department would only have been of use to people who knew the organisation and its staff so well that they would not need the direct dial phone list.

A site visitor perusing the 'contact details' section may know the name of the person they want to contact or they may know the job title. Or both. Or neither. Our task as communicators is to help them find that person. The one thing that we do know they know is this: the site visitor knows what they want to talk about. So our primary criterion has to be by topic, subject or area.

If you only have three or four staff, there's really no problem - as long as you make it clear who does what. But a long list of names requires more thoughtful organisation. The ideal is two separate lists (although this does require conscientious duplication of updates). One list should be alphabetical by surname, because if someone wants to contact Terry Jenkinson in Finance they can look him up under J. (For intranets of less formal companies, where people simply know 'Terry in Finance'. it may actually be better to go alphabetical by first name.) At a certain point, a list like this becomes so big and unwieldy that you might as well turn it into a database.

The other list should categorise people by their work. Not where they sit, not who they're managed by, but what they do. So Terry Jenkinson would be in the Finance subsection, which would be organised alphabetically with the other sections, under F, and which would have the finance staff organised alphabetically within it. (Alphabetical should be the default mode of all lists, only abandoned if there is some over-riding, compelling reason. There rarely is.)

One caveat to this is that Heads of Department, Chief Executives and the like often insist that they should be at the top of the (otherwise alphabetical) staff list. This vanity is so common that this arrangement is now, I believe, acceptable - so long as there a gap or some other way of indicating that the top name is not part of the greater list.

Staff contact lists should be based around what visitors know and what they want to find out, not how the company/organisation arranges itself. If people know how the company is arranged, they most likely already know who to talk to and what their phone number or e-mail is.

After I had left EMA, I saw their revised direct dial phone list. It had been re-organised into departments. Some people never learn.