Posted by Rich Brooks

Today is National Form Awareness Day and the government is requesting that you check your Web site forms. OK, I just made that up.

However, it makes sense to regularly check the forms on your Web site. Why?

1. When someone completes a form on your site they’re often taken to what’s called a landing page. This page isn’t part of your regular navigation, nor is it a page you see every day. Often, it contains information that’s no longer relevant or even completely wrong. By filling out your own forms you’ll see what your prospects see.
2. Depending on the type of form you have set up on your site, visitors may also receive an autoresponder email. Again, you don’t see these emails, but they’re delivered to your prospects’ email inboxes with your name on it. Do you even remember what your autoresponder says?
3. Occasionally, for no good reason, a form can “go off the tracks.” Maybe there was a database error, maybe you ran out of room on the server, maybe it was a random bug. Unfortunately, these problems don’t always fix themselves. If you find that you’ve stopped getting contact form emails you should test the form immediately and let your Web developer know if you find a problem.

Also, if you are receiving a lot of junk through your contact form it’s probably time to upgrade to a form that does a better job filtering out that junk. If you have any questions on that please let us know.

Comments

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Compliance. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients' sites through search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, business blogs and social media. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/therichbrooks.