Forms are a Breeze in WebPlus!

Forms are in important part of web site development. They allow site visitors to interact with you in a simple and convenient format. Whether its a simple registration form, or a complete order processing form, all can be created easily and quickly in WEBPLUS.

In order for forms to be helpful to you, make sure they get sent to you in a format you’re going to understand. One of the more frequent questions about forms is about data being received with meaningless field names. Take the example form below:

Obviously, when the details of this form are received, you will want to see something like:

Name: Fred Bloggs

EMail: fred@somedomain.com

Comments: I really like your website

In order to ensure this happens, right-click on your field boxes to bring up an edit screen. It looks like this:

You can now give your form fields a name that will get transmitted to you when a visitor submits the form. If you don’t rename your fields, you may receive the generic field names that WEBPLUS provides such as “edit1” “edit2” “edit3” etc.

When creating forms, always ensure that your site visitors know that their submission has been successful. Create a “Success” page in your site, but be sure to exclude it from your navigation. You can right-click in the Grey area of your form and select “Edit Form Properties”. In the dialog that opens, you will be able to specify a redirect page in the “redirect to” box. Point the redirect to your success page. When someone submits the form, they will automatically be taken to your success page to confirm that something happened.

Some points to note: You will only see the redirect box once you’ve selected an action for your form (e.g. Send to Serif Web Resources). You should also ensure that visitors have somewhere to go after seeing the success page. The easiest option is to put a link on the success page to your home page. It could say something like “Click Here to return to our home page”

Finally, use forms instead of advertising your email address on your site. Not everyone has an email client on their computer (they use Hotmail, yahoo or some other web-based email service). If you only provide an email address as your point of contact, many visitors will be forced to exit your site and enter their web-based email service. It’s also dangerous to show your email address on a web site. Many spam robots trawl the net every day looking for email addresses that can become the target of spam email. If you ignore this advice, you may well end up with hundreds of spam emails cluttering your inbox every day.