The Form Builder Blog

I usually add a form at the bottom of my site, because people can directly request information from the site: my form is usually 4 to 5 fields long.

I have the feeling that adding a link to an external site will let them think that they “quit” my site.

Any suggestions?

4-5 fields is in the grey-zone. Both form embedded and linking will do. I would place the form in the same page if the space taken by your content is (much) larger than the space taken by the form. Unless the main purpose of the page is the form itself.

If your link says “register your interest for this event”, the visitors will think about completing the action proposed (registering) — not about whether this is on this page or another. You may find that some people take the decision “I want to register”, but give up immediately when they see the size of the form to fill in. If the same people take the decision and just have to click on a link, they may well complete the same form on a different page because they are already there.

About form sizing, you can change the vertical size of a form by changing the attribute “height” in the form embedding HTML given by FormSmarts.

Whenever you add more fields to a form, you have to republish the HTML code snippet to your site. I didn’t do this initially and pretty soon the frame wasn’t high enough to contain the whole form.

This embed option doesnt work with Myspace? I tried to copy it into my about me section in my profile and all it does is show the code when the profile is displayed and not the form?

Keith,
MySpace no longer allows the use of “iframes”, so you can’t directly embed a form on your profile at this time. What you should do instead is link to the form URL.
We’re looking at creating a form widget specifically for MySpace in the near future.

How can I edit space between fields?

Nunoleite,
All you can change at this time is form layout and colors.

I want to put a simple, three-field email capture form on my TypePad blog to provide free bonuses to visitors, but the form is much wider than the available column on the blog site. How can I squeeze down the size to fit?

Sarah,
First, change the form layout to “question above field”. You should then manually edit the HTML code and reduce the width of the iframe. Text fields are likely to be too wide, but the form should still be usable.
We’ve noticed that a number of users are trying to fit forms in a side column of their blog, we’ll eventually release a narrow form layout design for this purpose.

As always when modifying form embedding code, pay attention to abide by our term of service: don’t alter the credit notice.

That sounds easy enough, but I don’t see where to ‘change the form layout.’ Where is that within the code that’s generated for me; and would I replace something (what?) with “question above field”? Thanks for your help!

You can change the form layout from the form details screen, in the Forms tab. Find out more here.

Is there no other way to post Formsmarts onto mypace profiles? Embedding does not work, and this is the only option you give besides linking. We all know linking is lame, as no one will follow the external link.

Dean,
There is at this time no ways to embed a form widget directly onto your MySpace profile. That is because the standard HTML embedding mechanism (iframes) is not supported by MySpace. We’re looking at possible MySpace-specific mechanisms.
Many users happily link to forms from their MySpace profile. Anyone using MySpace is aware of the external link warning screen, and that doesn’t seem to be an issue.

I’m trying to fit the form into a column narrower than 540 (making it 500 would be ideal) my problem is not the length of the fields, its the length of the form filling instructions that goes at the top of the form. If there was an auto wrap feature that would make it wrap around or a way to manually insert line breaks it would fix my problem. I know I could always write the instructions before I inserted the form, but it would look nicer to do it inside. is there a way to do this that i’m missing?

I’m trying to incorporate my form on my webpage at Google Sites. I do get an error message pop up when copying the source code saying “HTML content will be modified. Your html either contains unsafe tags (iframe, embedded, styles, script)or extra attributes. They will be removed when the page is viewed”. After updating the html, I only get the link “Can’t see your form? Click here!” I would much rather have the form embedded than having a link from my website. How can I best accommodate that?
thanks!!

Gudrun,
Google doesn’t allow iframes (the standard embedding mechanism on the web) on “Google Sites”. They did on their retired product “Google Pages”, so one of the reasons is quite understandably that they prefer to favor their own embedding format “Google Gadgets”. We will release Google Gadget forms in the coming months. You can use linking in the meantime.

Please, could you tell me an approx. release date of the Google Gadget to embed a form in Google Sites?

We’ll try to release this in the first quarter of 2010. Subscribe to our twitter feed to be notified when this feature becomes available.

Is there any easy way to center my entire form on my page?

Jen,
You could place the form’s HTML code shown in your account in a div:

<div style=”text-align:center” >
<!– Form HTML code goes here –>
</div>

I embed the form to my site but why does the form title not appear? only the form

Dhiyaa,
The form title only shows on standalone forms. When you embed a form into a web page, the title will be on that page, not on the form itself.