Forms And Their Use
Forms. They mean different things to different people. In the summer because I am a gardener, I think about using forms to create miniscapes in different parts of the garden. If I were a contractor working on building a house for a customer, forms could mean concrete forms for a foundation, forms to add a water feature to the yard etc.
But if you work with retail or businesses who sell services or products on the web forms mean a valuable method of mining data. This has become a standard way of capturing names and other pertinent information to be used many ways. But it is not as simple as it sounds.
Companies have to be very careful how and what they want from a form especially if it is to include a free giveaway. The key word is validation. Should it be client side or server side validation? I think definitely client side. What is key is that the person filling out the form provides content that meets the expectation of the client, the marketer.
We had an example recently where a form one of our clients sent out (not DDA’s work) did not have the right safe guards and our client was forced to send out more samples of the product because that was what was promised. If DDA had created the form, we would have tested it to prevent errors, we would have added restrictions to avoid mischief, we would have made sure the form would generate quality data only.
Companies needing forms know when they come to DDA to build their websites, they can count on our programmers to create forms that will generate reliable data. Nothing bogus ever. It is a fine art.
Entry by: elizabeth