Encouraging Contact Online [Accessibility] The Web industry is abuzz with topics such as cross-browser compatibility, usability, accessibility and the like, but are many Web designers overlooking one of the key functions of a Website: starting dialogue? Yes, we’re all very careful to ensure that every image has an ALT tag, every page renders nicely on various browsers, and our visitors can get to our product or service information easily, but are we ever putting ourselves in the position of the customer who wants to contact us? No matter whether your Website is informational, ecommerce-oriented or just a ‘brochure’, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to hide your contact information, or fail to encourage site visitors to contact you. Web users are a fickle lot — they’ll only look for your contact information for a short period of time before they give up.
Even if you do provide links to your generic contact form on every page, this leaves only half the battle fought. What happens when the user reaches your contact page? 7 Steps to Useable Forms. Ever the dutiful husband, I used to veg on the couch with my pregnant wife as we watched the most relaxing show in television history: "The Joy of Painting" hosted by the late Bob Ross on PBS. The ease with which he could knock off a landscape painting in twenty minutes made this the perfect Saturday morning fare for people not in a hurry to be anywhere. Every painting, if memory serves, had at least one happy little cloud in it. Each week Bob would say, "I feel a happy little cloud coming on, don’t you? " We sure did. Now, shift to the harsher reality of the Internet.
Think of your Website as one of Bob’s landscape paintings. Follow these 7 steps to make your forms – and your users – happy: 1) Get to the Point You may be asking for too much information. Don’t force users to scroll down to the first input field. 2) Provide Field Focus This easy "nice-to-have" puts the cursor directly into the first input field (first_name) when the form is displayed. 3) Add Help Information. Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms. Web developers loathe the task of building forms almost as much as users loathe having to fill them in. These are both unfortunate facts of the Web, but some smart JavaScript and intelligent CSS can go a long way to remedying the situation. In this article, I’ll introduce a number of simple tricks for improving the usability of forms, and hopefully inspire you to improve on them and create your own.
I’m going to start off with some simple tricks, before introducing the interesting stuff later on. If the material seems too simple for you, feel free to skip ahead. It’s the Little Things that Count You will certainly have encountered our first trick before; it’s used by Google, the world’s most popular search engine. This is, more or less, the method used by Google. <script type="text/javascript"> window.onload = document.getElementById('myfield').focus; </script> This can be added to any point in your HTML file, or hidden away in an external script.
Labels Why the two cursor declarations? The Importance of the Hypertext Document Title. The title is the element that identifies globally the document’s content. It is one of the most important contributors to a positive user experience for a Website’s visitors. Ironically, the title is commonly overlooked, or not considered, possibly because browsers don’t use the title within the document’s body. This article explains where the document title is used and how, by following just a few guidelines, you can create useful titles. Where to Use the Title The title is used in various places within the browser interface, so it’s important that it’s properly defined.
Bookmarks: Bookmarks allow the user to save the URL of an Internet resource. Title Bar: Most graphical browsers display the hypertext document title in the upper area of the user interface. Navigation Tabs: The user can access multiple resources through one browser instance. Session History: Browsers provide at least two buttons that allow the user to move back and forward between the resources visited in a session.