cmarshall - 3:29 pm on Mar 1, 2007 (gmt 0)

would it be better if there was a text field for the address instead of text boxes for individual street, town, post code?

Absolutely, but it would mean a lot more work for you. Either a human would need to read the text, or you would need some kind of smart parser. An AJAX filler that worked on a zip lookup would be kewl as well. I've seen these used. They fill in the town and state fields.

I used to have a problem report page on a site I did. It had all kinds of fields that helped track down what the exact problem was, etc.

Everybody started using the regular contact form to report problems. I think the form only got used once.

I replaced it with a simple email-style form, and added a user agent sniffer. Now everyone uses it. Sometimes I need to go back and forth a bit, but far less than the original one, because the most common question is "What browser/OS are you using?"