Web design tips: How to design effective and usable web forms

The first thing to consider when designing web forms is its utility: where on site you are going to use it and what is the meaning of the form. A log in or a signup web form is not the same with the form used for placing an online order for something or a service, they are very different in matter of content and their place inside a website.

You must keep in mind that users (especially first time users) love to play with the service (the website and what its content) instead filling long web form for an account they might never use in the future or for something they will never buy. So try to keep your user requirements minimal when filling any form. Let them explore your site, if you need from him lots and lots of data in order to make an order or to complete the user profile for a social media website or network break the data into several web form with the essential information only, on specific sections.

In order to have an effective and usable web form (any web form) you need 3 important things: the HTML tags of input elements encapsulated inside a

tag, a computer programming language to generate (if necessary) and to get and post the data and a SQL database to store the data.

The HTML tags of web forms

All the inputs of a web form are encapsulated into the

tag, the most used types are text, textarea, radio, checkbox, select (dropdowns). They are send to the server using the submit button. You must have a good grasp of HTML tags in order to deal with all these elements, you have to understand the basic concepts and you have to format the text in general. It's not so hard you might think, you can learn everything about the subject in only few days.

Progamming languages that get and post the data

The programming languages can generate some of the web form elements depeding of the case (you can use the same form to add or modify an item into the database), but that's not necessary. Most of the web forms are static, hardcoded in HTML.

But all the web forms send data to server using _POST or _GET variables and you have to deal with those variables using the programming languages. Some of the web forms are only used to send mails (the contact forms), but a lot of web forms store the data into the SQL databases and you have to know how to do it using at least one of the languages supported by your server. You can use php, asp.net or jsp (java server pages - it uses java), for example, for the server side and you can use javascript to validate the inputs in the web forms on the client side (the actual website loaded by the browser).

The SQL database to store the data

One of the most common databases used for websitesare MySql databases, but they are not the only ones. In some systems (especially internal system for companies that uses websites to gather information from several worldwide locations) there are used Oracle databases because they are more professional (than MySql) and there are provided services to recover data if the system crashes (there is always a chance for this to happen, even it's a very small one).

There are several other database systems to store data, you can always search for more information about them. They are used along with the programming languages to insert, modify (update) or delete the data.

For more information about this subject or for custom web forms you can contact us at Supravirtual.ro.