FormSmarts Web Form Blog

Form Owner Verification with Google Page Creator

To verify you own a website, we ask you to create a file with a specific name on your web host. If you use Google Page Creator, proceed as follows to verify your site:

1. create a new page
2. enter the verification file name (e.g. syronex8800…2523.html) as the page title
3. publish the new page

Form ownership verification is optional but recommended to build trust with your visitors. It is required you intend to advertise a web form URL by email.

Recent Issues with Google Page Creator

Although hundreds of Google Page Creator users have successfully verified their site, we’ve had a few issues in the last few days. Google was redirecting some of the requests to googlepages.com to the same page on google.com, thus preventing us to check the verification file exists. We obviously have a limited scope for action, but we identified a likely cause and took technical measures that seem to have solved the problem. Leave a comment if you experience any more problems.

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 in form builder.
1 Comment »
Tags: embed, form builder, google page creator, widget

How to Lay Out Form Input Fields

Your goal as a web publisher is maximize the number of (legitimate) respondents to your forms. A first step towards this goal is to lay out your forms in a way that is intuitive to users, makes forms faster to fill in, and minimizes form validation errors.

It follows four points you should consider when designing a web form:

• choose the most appropriate input field widget for the situation
• group fields together within logical sections
• place multi-line text input fields (textarea in HTML) towards the bottom of the form
• group optional fields together at the bottom of the form

The first point is discussed in details in FormSmarts documentation.

The second point commends, for example, that when you ask people about their contact details, you group all relevant fields (first name, last name, email,…) together. We found that most form designers tend to do that right. The form builder will in the future allow users to define different logical (and visual) sections within web forms.

Multi-line text input fields obviously tend to take longer to fill in than other input fields. They require more effort, thinking and typing, so place them after other fields. Visitors will be less inclined to abandon the form altogether if they have already spent time completing the first part of the form.

The last point is about grouping optional fields together at the bottom of the form. This allows people to quickly review the remaining questions, and skip the fields they don’t want to fill in or don’t apply to them. This may of course conflict with grouping fields within logical sections. In that case, place optional fields at the end of each logical section.

We’ve now enabled comments, and we warmly welcome your thoughts and feedback about this post. if you’re reading this by email, just click on the title to post a reply.

Posted on June 29th, 2008 in HTML form.
4 Comments »
Tags: form builder, form design, howto, input field, web forms

Ever Wished You Could Reorder Fields?

The set of form-making operations supported by FormSmarts form builder was up to now almost complete, allowing to:

• create a form
• delete a form
• edit form properties (name, title, return URL, form filling instructions, recipient email account)
• add a form input field
• delete a field
• edit field properties (name, description, field type, input widget, optional/required)

The last unsupported operation was to allow users to easily change the order in which fields appear on a form. This is often needed to:

• group fields logically
• group optional fields together at the bottom of a form
• insert a field in a existing form
• move fields around to increase the visual appeal of a form

Reordering fields manually is tedious, as it involves deleting and re-creating fields.

No more. Reordering fields is now a trivial drag & drop: in the fields tab, drag the field you want to move, and drop it in the position you want.

As usual, we welcome your comments and suggestions about this feature.

Posted on June 20th, 2008 in form builder.
1 Comment »
Tags: form builder, form design, input field

Text & Background Colors in Embedded Forms

As already mentioned in another post, we are soon going to allow FormSmarts users to customize the look of web forms. This applies in particular to embedded forms.

At this time, the form text color is black, and the form background is transparent. This leads to an issue when the page hosting the form has a black background. If you are affected by this problem, please contact us so we change the text color of your forms to white.

We welcome your suggestions about form look/style configuration options you would find useful, besides colors and border.

Posted on June 17th, 2008 in HTML form.
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Tags: embed, web forms, widget

Form Recipient Management Now Available

You can manage the email addresses registered on your FormSmarts account in the Settings tab, under Form Recipients.

Adding a Form Recipient

A new email address you’ve just added to your account is shown as Unverified. Once you’ve visited the verification link emailed to you, its status will change to Verified. Note: you will need to refresh the table if you opened the verification link in a new window.

Changing the Recipient of a Form

When you create a new form, results are sent to the login email address by default. To have a form sent to another email account, create a new recipient (Form Recipients option in the Settings tab), and then edit form details (Forms tab) to change the recipient for that form. A recipient must be verified before it can be used as a form recipient.

A form may only have one recipient. See this comment.

Changing Your Login Email

You can set any of the verified email addresses registered on your account as your FormSmarts login. There is one restriction: you can’t set an email address as you login if it’s already the login for another account.

A key icon is displayed next to your login email address.

Note: any email addresses that you use as login or form recipient has the Active status, and can’t be deleted.

Give Feedback!

We welcome your feedback about this feature. This will help us improve it in the future.

Posted on June 16th, 2008 in form builder.
6 Comments »
Tags: form builder, form recipient

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