The web has always been the foremost option to promote our enterprise or offers. But online promotion of our business is only half a job done. Today, with the internet reaching across homes and crossing all international borders and making the world more “flat”, it only makes sense to use its potential in making our businesses and endeavors grow and make them visible to a global market. With websites becoming more and more interactive, it only makes sense to have an inbuilt, solid CRM or customer relationship management built in, within our websites. For starters, this can be achieved by the use of contact forms.

Why Contact Forms?

Contact forms enable your to-be clients to get in touch with you and to post feedback of your website, products and/or services. If you are a local business, thinking of getting a website, get one. A website with contact forms would make your business global, giving a global market audience a chance to interact with you, your employees and opt for your services or products.

Contact Forms ensure more visitors and to-be clients to know much more about your services and guarantee more leads for your products or services.

Most websites today have a “contact us” or “email us” section, using which most visitors get in touch with the business owners for further inquiries, questions, feedbacks, etc. More often than not, most websites just leave an email address exposed on such pages, while at the bottom of it all this works just fine where generating leads or getting feedbacks from customers or to-be customers are concerned, what it lacks is security. In such cases your email address is exposed to not just your customers but also “programs” or spammers, which collect these email addresses and spam your inbox.

A contact form, would definitely help prevent this situation and would definitely offer a better user experience.

The Ideal Contact Form

An ideal “contact us” webpage would have the name and address of the business owner or individual, with a form that would take generalized inputs from the user. On submitting such a form, the details would be mailed to you and the individual who had filled up the form. An ideal contact form would take Name, address, email and remarks/questions as inputs and would be effortless to the user as possible. Normally, such contact forms are built on the idea that the user visiting your website may not have time to fill in too many details. So these are kept short and sweet and right to the point.

So….Contact Forms….

In simple words, a contact form ensures a secure medium of interaction between your business(you) and your potential market, in a global sense. A contact form is an extremely crucial step to be taken where your online business is concerned and would definitely increase your leads/sales by atleast ~8%. These and other benefits would be enough for any business online to put up contact forms. The only down side of such contact us forms, is people like to feel more secure when submitting personal information like their name, address and email address. This could be addressed by a “privacy policy” section on your website and it is highly recommended to have a privacy policy web page, as google is also known to count this in where SEO is concerned.

How to create a contact form?

Contact forms differ in structure depending upon the websites. A simple website would have a simple HTML form that would take in the text typed in the text fields by the user. A site may also have validations in such a contact form. These validations could be written in any scripting language like JavaScript, Ajax or PHP. This would make sure the visitor hasn’t sent incorrect data, i.e., the validations acts as constraints, and these constraints make sure that there are no blank fields and the email address submitted by a website user is valid. The validations show the form again with error messages only if errors are present, of course. We can use this to send a copy directly to the employees of the company or just to keep a back-up.

Anyone would be able to create a basic contact form of his or her own after some initial reading on HTML and Javascript. We must get familiar with the basic HTML tags first:

The “<form>” tag : helps create a form for the user input. It consists of a very important attribute that must be specified in the ‘<>’ of the form tag. It is the ‘action’ method. The URL is its value.

Optional attribute: ‘method’: helps to send data to the action URL. It takes two values: get and post.

The form tag must have a closing “</form>” tag also.

Within the “<form>” and “</form>”  tags, we place our textboxes and form submission buttons.

We have the “<input>” tag which defines the start of an input field where the user can enter data. This is where the interesting part of creating textboxes and buttons come into play. They are created depending on the attributes that are passed to the “<input>” tag.

To create a textbox we must pass the attribute ‘type=”text”’ and for a button pass ‘type=”button”’.

Here is a HTML code snippet of a contact form.

<?php

$sysmail = “you@yourdomain.com”;

if ($_POST['sendmessage'])
{
if(!isset($_POST['message']))
{
$messages = “You’re email needs to contain a message, dummy!!!<br>”;
}
elseif(!preg_match(”/^.*?@.*?$/”, $_POST['email']))
{
$messages = “Stop trying to trick me and use a real email, or me and you will fall out!!<br>”;
}
elseif(mail($sysmail, stripslashes(trim($_POST['subject'])), stripslashes(trim($_POST['message'])), “From: ” . $_POST['email'] . “\r\n”))
{
$messages = “Thanks for your message someone will get back to you shortly.<br>”;
}
else {
$messages = “The programmer who wrote this isn’t as clever as he thinks, and something has gone wrong.<br>”;
}
}
?>
<h2>Contact Form</h2>
<form action=”" method=”post”>
<span style=”color:#FF0000; font-weight:bold;”><?=$messages ?></span>
<table width=”50%” border=”0″>
<tr>
<td width=”50%” valign=”top”><div align=”right”><strong>Your Email Address : </strong></div></td>
<td width=”50%” valign=”top”><input type=”ext” id=”email” name=”email” size=”50″/></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”><div align=”right”><strong>Message Subject : </strong></div></td>
<td valign=”top”><input type=”ext” id=”subject” name=”subject” size=”50″/></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”><div align=”right”><strong>Your Message </strong></div></td>
<td valign=”top”><textarea name=”message” cols=”50″ rows=”10″ id=”message”></textarea></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan=”2″ valign=”top”><div align=”center”>
<input type=”submit” value=”Send Message”>
</div></td>
</tr>
</table>
<input type=”hidden” name=”sendmessage” value=”1″>
</form>

As you can see from the above Contact Form Code example, we have used php and HTML to create a simple form that would mail the details entered into the form to a predefined email address ‘you@yourdomain.com’. This form accepts, email address, message subject and message body as the input here. Your contact form input could vary and would be defined by your business logic. For more please feel free to look at the resources provided below.

More Contact Form Resources

A quick kickstart on getting such contact forms up and running on your website, without any prior html or web scripting experience would be to visit http://www.emailmeform.com/ or www.mycontactform.com

Full featured tutorial on contact forms @ http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/forms/
For more information to create contact forms please refer http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

For more information on scripting languages please refer:
http://www.w3schools.com/Vbscript/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp
http://www.tizag.com/phpT/