Paying Attention to Forms in Website Designing

Forms form a very important part of your website as they are used for buying products, contacting you, and signing up a newsletter.In other words, forms activate users to take action, do something, achieve something. Forms must be created keeping in mind all kinds of users-whether it is the normal human beings or visually challenged ones.

One of the most important things to remember in form creation is to provide prompt text for each form item and field. The purpose of each form item has to be clear to the users with an appropriate lable for the fields. Not only this, the position and placing of the text has to be correct. It is advisable to place the appropriate text immediately before input boxes, drop down boxes and after the check boxes and radioboxes.

A form has to be accessible to the readers by breaking it down into manageable chunks, like one chunk constituting of personal details, the other dealing with contact information, etc.and so on. So, in case your form is a long one, it is better to use "fieldset" and "legend" tags for both sighted and visually impaired readers.

Another very crucial factor in form accessibility is the reliance of drop down menus on JavaScript. If the drop down menus rely on JavaScript, thet will not be very accessible to the users. They have to be created in such a way that in order to activate them, theuser has to click on a separate button instructing "Go" which allows the form to be activated on the server side. These kind of drop down menus are easily accessible.

In a nutshell, one can say that a thing like forms that might appear to be a very easy and unsignificant area of web designing , but actually is a very important and essential component. Therefore, it needs to be created very carefully keeping in mind the users who are going to act upon the form presented to them.

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