7 steps to make website forms better
Since many people who design web forms have never designed any form of any kind in their lives before, it’’s hardly surprising that plenty of the results could do with a little improvement – and if you”ve spent any time on the web, you”ll know just how annoying bad forms can be. In this article, then, we”ll look at seven quick and easy ways to make your web forms much better. 2. Don”t Use Huge Drop-Downs. Likewise, though, if you are nice enough to let me choose a country, don”t make me do it from an alphabetised list of every country in the world! The same thing goes for lists of states, counties, and so on. Drop down lists that are long enough to have scroll bars are just plain difficult to use and inconvenient – I”d much rather just type the name myself, thanks. 3. Always Offer Suggestions. So someone can”t get something they filled in on a form – their username or domain name or whatever was already taken. What do you do? Please don”t just say “sorry, that one’’s taken, please try another”. Come up with some useful suggestions of alternatives that are available, and let me choose them easily if I like them. Do try to be more imaginative than just adding numbers to the end, though, unless you want all your users to be called ”jane23436”. 4. Don”t Punish Double Submitters. 5. Stop Being So Picky. 6. Display Warnings on the Page. 7. Only Ask for What You Need.
1. Remember the Rest of the World.
This one is a call-out to American websites especially: don”t forget that your site will have more than just American visitors! It’’s very insulting to be asked to register for something, only for the site to demand my state and zip code, leaving no space for me to choose any other country or enter a postal code in any other format than five digits. To save the trouble of the whole thing, I usually just go for ”California” and ”90210” – a bad entry for that person’’s database, just because they didn”t consider me when they designed their form.
There are some people, let’’s face it, who just aren”t all that sure how the web works. They”ve been taught that you have to double-click computer things to make them work, and so double-click they do – on links, on buttons, on everything. At some point, one of these people is likely to click twice on your submit button. You should allow for this in advance, instead of punishing them for it with an error. You might even consider using Javascript to grey out the submit button once it’’s been pushed once, which solves the problem in most cases.
Come on, now, do you really need my birth in dd/mm/yyyy format? Couldn”t you figure out what I meant if I wrote a month out in words, or if I only put in a one-digit day, or a two-digit year? Of course you could. Don”t throw my input back and ask me to fix things that a little server-side scripting could just as easily fix for me.
There are few things more annoying than websites which pop-up those little alert boxes, causing the computer to make a loud ”ding!” sound as they do so. If there’’s something I need to go back and fix, add the warning to the page itself, preferably with a red border or background to mark it out for my attention. Don”t make me read a dialog box, click OK, and scroll back up myself to hunt for my mistake.
Last but not least, this is a rule that could make so many web forms so much better. If the information you”re asking for isn”t absolutely crucial to your dealings with me, don”t ask for it. Every second I spend filling in a form is a second I spend getting more frustrated with your website, and more likely not to finish what I”ve started if something goes even slightly wrong. Your site should be set up to figure out as much as it can about me automatically. Don”t ask what language I want to use – my browser tells you that in its HTTP headers. Don”t ask which country I”m from – you can detect that with my IP address. Save me time, and I”ll be much more likely to appreciate your site.
Go ahead & start with website payment in 5 simple steps
When you”re selling things, you need people to be able to pay you. Sure, they could send you cheques in the post, but that’’s not really convenient or scalable, is it? No, to do business on the web, you need to be able to accept card payments electronically – and, luckily for you, it’’s never been easier. Here’’s the whole process, in five simple steps. While you could get a merchant account and do your own card processing, it isn”t usually worth it, unless you do an awful lot of transactions. For most business, third-party payment services are a better solution, and there are lots of services out there that let you accept card payments for a small fee. When you choose a payment service, then, the main things you want to consider are the prices, and whether your customers will trust it. You used to need to consider which services your customers would have accounts with, but as most services now let you accept payments from people who don”t have accounts with them that’’s not much of an issue any more. Right now, the biggest general payment player is PayPal, and they”re worth considering first, but you should be aware that many businesses have had issues with PayPal freezing their accounts and being slow to respond (see www.nopaypal.com for more). StormPay (www.stormpay.com) is a decent general-purpose PayPal alternative, and useful to keep around as a backup. You might also like to check out more specific services, such as AuctionCheckout (if you”re taking payments for auction items) or ClickBank (non-physical products only, popular for ebook sales). Step 2: Create an Account. The next step is to create an account at your chosen online payment provider. This will require you to give out either your personal name and address or a business name and address. Depending on who you”re registering with, you may also need to give out credit card or bank details. It almost goes without saying that you shouldn”t give these details out to anyone you”re not sure of – be suspicious of payment services that you”ve found with a search but never actually seen in use. Step 3: Get Verified. Before you can receive any significant amount of money, most payment providers require you to become ”verified” – this is usually nothing more than the minimum they need to do to comply with the law. If you haven”t been asked for your bank and credit card details already, you will be at this point, and some services will even ask you to fax them a photocopy of your physical card, to prove you”re the real cardholder. Some services will even cross-reference your phone number with your address and then phone you up to make sure it really was you. Don”t be too disturbed by all this: it’’s all in the name of security, and you”re not doing anything bad (or at least I hope you”re not!). Step 4: Add the Payment Button to Your Pages. When it comes time to actually start accepting customers” money through the service, all you”ll need to do in most cases is add some kind of button or image of a button to your sales page that says ”Pay Now”. The payment service will usually provide the HTML for this, and a few tutorials to explain things like ways to make sure that the correct amount shows up on the payment page. Step 5: Withdraw Often. Whenever you”re dealing with electronic payments, the final step is to withdraw every time you get an amount of money you consider significant, and an absolute minimum of once per week. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but the biggest one is that online payment services aren”t anywhere near as strictly regulated as other financial institutions, and aren”t under that much of an obligation to give it to you in any timely manner. You should consider any money left with them to be at risk until it’’s securely in your bank account. Besides, you don”t want your money sitting there earning interest for them instead of you, do you?
Step 1: Choose a Payment Service.
let us start simple for website - HTML
HTML is a relatively simple language, but that doesn”t stop people from having problems with it. Why is that? It’’s mainly because, while the HTML tags themselves are easy, creating an HTML document that works as intended on a web server requires you to know a few extra things that aren”t often explained. Here, then, is a guide to understanding those parts of HTML that they just don”t tell you about in the books. It isn”t often noted that valid HMTL documents don”t actually start with the tag – they have one extra tag before it. This is the doctype, and it must be present right at the top of your document for it to be valid HTML. There are only really two doctypes that you really need to know about. The HTML4 doctype looks like this: The XHTML one looks like this: These versions of the doctypes that are a little more forgiving – if you”re a purist, you can use the strict ones instead by changing the words ”transitional” and ”loose” to ‘’strict”. But what is the doctype for? Well, its purpose is simple enough: it tells web browsers exactly what version of HTML your page was written in, to help them to interpret it correctly. Step 2: Understand HTTP Errors. A truly shocking number of people writing HTML pages don”t know how HTTP works – and they quickly run into trouble because of it. HTTP is the way a web browser communicates with a web server, and this communication includes information about your pages, such as cookies. You don”t need to worry too much about the internals of HTTP, but it’’s worth knowing that it works by the browser sending a request to the server for a certain page, and the server then responding with a code. Your website should be set up to handle error codes well. For example, a 404 (page not found) error should show a page with links to the most useful parts of your site. Other common error codes include: 200 - OK 301 - Page moved. 403 - Forbidden (no authorisation to access). 500 - Internal server error. For more information, visit www.w3.org/protocols. Step 3: Understand MIME Types. MIME types are another part of the HTML header – an important one. Also known as the content-type header, they tell the browser what kind of file they are about to send. Browsers don”t rely on HTML files ending in .html, JPEG images ending in .jpeg, and so on: they rely on the content-type header. If you don”t know about this, you can have problems if you need to configure your server to send anything unusual. Here are some common MIME types: text/html - HTML. text/css - CSS text/plain - plain text. image/gif - GIF image. image/jpeg - JPEG image. image/png - PNG image. audio/mpeg - MP3 audio file. application/x-shockwave-flash - Flash movie. Step 4: Understand Link Paths. One of the hardest things to understand about HTML is all the different things that you can put in an ”href” property. Abbreviated URLs are created using the rules of old text-based operating systems, and there are plenty of people writing HTML today who are completely unfamiliar with these rules.
Step 1: Understand Doctypes.
