An online contact form

A contact form is the most common type of form used in websites and blogs. The immediate contact with your users is very important since only they can tell you if you are doing something wrong. Contact forms may be used for feedbacks, technical support, customer service, information, sales etc.

The contact form may be created using a form builder. Read this step by step manual of how to create a contact form and try it yourself.

The basics of creating an email form

 Following are the basic and most important steps for creating a functional and esthetic email form:

1- Drag and drop elements
Choose the relevant elements for you and drag them on to the design area.

2- Layout and alignment
Since the layout is not rigid in the formlogix form builder you can place your elements anywhere you wish in the design area.
Use the alignment options to place your elements in perfect alignment (align top/bottom/left/right) and use the “make same height/width option to define equal spacing between elements.

3- Element settings
Select each and every element and enter the relevant information and settings for it. The most important setting that must be entered in the element “caption”.
The caption is the name of the element and will appear in different palaces: the emails, the data management tool report, the filters, etc.
Another important attribute in the element settings is the “tab index” with which you can define the order of fields when the form filler tabs through them (uses the “tab” key).

Apart from the mentioned above the element settings holds the width and height of the element, the capability to define a mandatory field as well as define the background, font color and add style code.

All that’s left now is to save the form, preview it and try it out before publishing the form and embedding it in your site.

Aligning the email form elements

When creating an email form with a form builder you can place your elements anywhere on the form. This flexibility is a great feature but in most web forms the elements are aligned somehow. Besides, aligned elements make the form cleaner looking, easier to understand and much more pleasing to the eye. So how do you align the elements if needed and what alignment options are available in your email form builder?

There are a few tools one can use for selected elements’ alignment:

1-      Horizontal alignment options. One can align a few elements to the right, center or left. This is a classic solution for aligning bullets or rows of textboxes, for example.

2-      Vertical alignment options. One can align a few elements to the top, middle or bottom.

3-      Grid. A user may use the grid (which is combined or vertical and horizontal guide lines) to align his/her elements. You can freely place your elements against the lines or choose to “snap” the elements automatically to the grid by using the “snap to grid” option.
4-      Make same height/width. These options enable the user to determine an equal spacing between the selected elements. The same spacing may be applied horizontally or vertically.

using the grid to align elementsalignment by snapping to grid

 

press on the make same vertical space icon

elements are evenly spaced

 

 

make same vertical space

 

align top

align left

Adding private fields to an email form

Can one add invisible private fields to a finished email form (fields not visible to the form filler) and if so-How can you do this?

Creating a simple email form is easy but how can one insert invisible fields in the form for tracking and commenting?
This is an important feature for those who need to /rate/distinguish between/comment/etc on the data entries they collect without making the form filler aware of it.
This can be done in a form builder using the “Private Access Fields” option. In this option the form owner places the fields of his choice in a container element and defines it as “private access”. Once the form is saved and published the fields are not visible in the form, but are only accessible to the form owner in the data management tool.

Steps for using the access fields:
1) Enter the form’s report page.
2) Double Click on a specific entry line to enter the entry’s edit mode (or choose ‘Tools’>Edit).
3) Your access fields will now be sowing and you will be able to enter data in them.

Creating a field template in an email form builder

When using an email form builder on a regular basis you may notice that you need to use a few fields or field sections over again in different forms.

You can of course clone the whole email form but then you will need to delete the unnecessary parts each time. Another solution is using a “Field Template”.

A form template is a ready made field, or a section of fields that a form owner can use in his/her form (For example a list of countries or contact fields).
But how can you create such a template?
In this option a form owner can create a custom field template according to his/her specific needs and save it for future use.
Goes without saying that templates saved by one form owner has nothing to do those saved in another account. Each for his own as they say…

These are the instructions for creating such a template:

Prepare the template in the form designer: 1- A – if you wish to create a single field template simply drag the element on to the design area, define its properties and select it.

single field template

B – if you wish to create a group field template simply drag the elements in to a container element and select the container.

field section template

2- In the “General Toolbar” – press on the “Add Field Template” icon.

3- Give your template a name and press on the “OK” button.

4- The template will then be added to the field template List and will be available for use.

choosing template

Choosing the template from the list will result in it appearing in the form.

choosing template

tell a friend email form

The “tell a friend” is a classic email form and is getting to be really popular. I guess it’s because the internet is so big you can get lost and good things are good to bookmark.
Creating such an email form is funny enough very simple and easy if you use a form builder.

Steps to create a “tell a friend” form :
1) Enter the form creator.
2) Drag a Label element in to the design area and enter text explaining what the form is about. For example: Please enter your friends email address in order to recommend this site to him/her.
3) Drag another Label element and enter the text “Friends email address”.
4) Drag an Email element, place it next to the label and go to its element settings.
5) Enter the text “Friends email address” in the element “caption” field.
6) Make sure that it’s defined as mandatory and that its “Send Copy” checkbox is turned on. This checkbox is in charge of sending an email to the address entered by a user in the email element.
7) Go to the “Form Settings” and fill in a message in the “Email User Message” field. This message will appear at the beginning of the email sent to friends.
Make sure you use [n] when you want to create a line break. For example: Hi,[n]I wanted to tell you about this great site i found[n]Its called FormLogix.
Add a submit button.
9) Save the form.

Email form custom mailing option

The email form builder is not only an online tool for collecting data; it also consists of a data management tool in which you can handle the accumulated data. This data management tool is good for sorting the data, editing it, deleting the entries which are no longer needed, printing the forms, etc. It also enables you to send emails to the people who filled in you form – this is called “Custom Mailing”.

 

Let’s say your results table consists of your company’s clients (names, addresses, telephone numbers…).
This mailing option gives you a way to send them (or part of them) an email regarding common issues such as
Sending them all sales and discount information…

The use of this option is really simple. All you need to do in order to send an email to the people in your report is:
1- Open the “mail” option in the toolbox.
2- Turn on the checkbox of the relevant data entries (on the left column of the result table) – you will see all the addresses accumulated in the “mail” option’s “to” field.
Please notice that you may use a text editor to change the way your message looks by pressing on the “Edit Text” button. Pressing on the “Save” icon in the editor will save all the changes (styles applied and text changes) and return to the mail option in the toolbox.
3- Write the email subject and message and send the email.

Publishing an email form

Once an email form is created and if you intend on collecting data from people (and not fill in the data yourself)

you need to externalize it so people could enter the form and fill in data.

The publishing options in the form generator are six:

 

1- URL – this is the url of the form. Using this option requires to copy the code and paste it in a browser’s address line.
2- IFRAME – this option is intended for embedding a form in blogs.
3- LINK – this is the link for others to enter the form through. When using this option you can paste the link code in your html code or  send it to someone in an email.
4- SCRIPT – this option is intended for embedding a form in a website.
5- MAIL – an option in which you can send the link of a form in an email.
6- GOOGLE SITES – this is code suitable for those who wish to embed the form in “Google Sites”.

 

All you need to do is pick the publish option that is most suitable for you.

Online email form wedding invitation

My friend just got married. The mess of it all…invitations, dress, ring, flowers, catering, dj, photographer, hall…what not. I suggested she use an online email form to invite guests and track who ever is coming since she didn’t really have the time to find out herself. “good idea” she said, “but…I don’t know how to create such a thing. And I don’t have the time to learn and anyway, don’t you need to be a programmer for that?”

“no” I answered “you simply need to use a form builder, you don’t need any programming skills”.

After 5 minutes of explaining she calmed down. I took out my laptop, and logged in to my form maker. We started to drag and drop elements from the toolbar: a textbox to collect the person’s name, an email element to collect his/her email address, a checkbox to turn on if you plan to attend and a text area for comments.

The bride to be got so excited that she wanted to play with the web generator herself: started changing the text font and size, the color scheme and generally just moved everything around. She remembered that she had a nice picture of her and her boy friend in her mailbox…”do you think we can add the pic to the form?” she asked. “sure” I answered and dragged an image element on to the form’s design area.

From here to there a great looking form was created. We published it as an email and a link to the form was sent to all of her recipients.

The online invitation was a great success. People were calling to congratulate and say what a beautiful invitation it was and wanted to know how to create a similar form for a friend/relative.  

 

 

creating an auto response for an email form

The email form sends the form owner an email once data is submitted in to the form, but what about the form filler? What happens if we want the form filler to get an auto response email once he fills in the form? Some kind of validation for his entered data, a message (like: we are out of the office, we will get in touch tomorrow) or even a simple thanks.

When using a form builder the email to the form owner is sent by default. In order to have the form filler get an auto response you will need to:

1-       have an “email element” in the form

2-      

select the element and make sure that the “send copy” option is checked in its settings

 

 

 

The “send copy” option sends a carbon copy of the data entered in the form to the form filler. This email has a fixed format but you can add text to beginning of this layout by using the “email user message” or decide to customize the email altogether by using the “Custom User Email”.

In the “email user message” option only text may be inserted in to the existing email. There can be no alteration of style and the email format in this option.

email user message

 

 

 

In the

“Custom User Email” option you can create your own responder from scratch. Writing the text, adding form variables (if you wish the email to show the form filler’s name or other fields that he filled in), and styling the form are all available in this option.

custom user email