Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites

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Kevin Potts

"Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites"

Usability considerations
Beyond the squishy realm of deciding on required fields, there are a few usability considerations
for contact forms. These are not laws written in blood and stone, but rather best
practices recognized by the general web community:
Use the correct HTML tags when writing your form. Using the ,

,
and tags properly will aid in the general accessibility of your form. Also,
dictating the tab index using the tabindex attribute ensures that keyboard users
will flow through the form naturally.
If using JavaScript to enhance the functionality of the form, make sure that the
form works just as well if JavaScript is disabled.10
When creating error messages, make sure that they are explicit in telling the user
what field is affected and what they can do to fix the problem. For instance, if
there??™s an error in the phone number field, a message like ???Bad data??? does not help
anyone. But if the error is something like ???Please make sure your phone number is
at least seven characters long,??? users can quickly discover where they went wrong.
Once you??™ve built your form, test it on different browsers with different length messages,
and make sure they are being received by the proper inboxes.

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Kevin Potts

"Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites"