A website today makes a huge difference in brand marketing and promotion. It is one powerful tool that business organizations utilize in getting the word out about their mission as well as their products and services.
But a website is more than just establishing an online presence and providing information about what you do. Other important factors need to be considered to ensure that your business achieves its goals such as gaining more followers and potential clients and increasing sales.
One vital element that a business website must have these days is the form. This can be used for various purposes such as generating leads, gaining sales for your products or services, conducting surveys and promoting newsletters or catalogs.
Your main goal in publishing forms is to make it convenient for your followers to get updates about your company, purchase your products or avail of your services and to participate in your polls and surveys. It’s an effective way of providing value to them, keeping their interest to your business offerings and getting their feedback. It serves as a communication tool that allows businesses and people to interact conveniently online.
What To Include In The Form
A website form can be customized according to your specific preference. It can include text boxes, text areas, check boxes, radio buttons, dropdown lists and file upload. It also needs to be implemented successfully to ensure that users will not encounter any error when filling it out. Online services offering customized web forms such as CaptainForm provide easy help to businesses.
Once you have published your form on the site, you need to inform visitors about it, what they can gain from signing up and why you are asking for certain information. This way, they will know what they are signing up for.
Another thing to take into account is to offer help for people who might encounter problems when filling out the form. Adding a Help link in your form would be helpful.
Consider as well providing a translation for different languages not only for the form labels but also for the verification and error messages. This is vital particularly if you want to target an international audience.
Above all this, do ensure that you keep your form simple and straight to the point. Ask only information that you need so as not to discourage your visitors and show examples about details that you want. Keep in mind that not every individual visiting your site is not active internet user and thus, not used to filling out website forms.
Make sure that you also provide clear error messages for direct feedback. This will also allow people to easily make corrections instead of leaving your site. It would also be best to save the correct details already provided so that they won’t need to make corrections when they go back to certain fields.
Do give feedback on the progress of the user. Using colors and indicating the steps are also good ways to inform and encourage the person filling out your form. A clear feedback after data submission is a must as well to let the user know that he or she has successfully filled out the form.
Why Use WordPress
A business website can be made more interactive when using a WordPress platform. As the most preferred content management system, WordPress
offers a lot of benefits compared to its close competitors. Currently, it is used by 67 percent of the total number of sites that have a CMS. Also, there are now 60 million installations of WordPress and one-sixth of all sites in the top million sites by traffic are powered by the same platform.
Unlike what most people believe that WordPress is only a blogging platform, it is actually also commonly used for ecommerce websites. It can be used to create an online shop in combination with blogs, corporate pages and portfolios. Additionally, it provides numerous features from plugins and tools to themes and integrations.
The plugins, in particular, are one of the strong points of WordPress making it ideal for business and ecommerce websites. Most are free to use and they add new functions to the site.
The themes are additional pros. Being editable with an open source approach, any theme can be customized according to a business owner’s preferences that suit his or her website. Some themes also come with built-in forms such as the contact form but you are always free to create your own using a plugin. This way, you can tailor the form to complement the look of your website and add extra fields that you want.
If you want to create your own WordPress form, there are many free and paid plugins with various features. The Contact Form 7 is an example of a free plugin while the popular GravityForms or FormCraft are considered premium plugins.
The WPForms is the most beginner friendly but a powerful tool to use. It features a drag and drop online form builder, is free to use and can be installed in many sites. It also has a premium version that can create multi-page forms, email subscription forms, payment forms and order forms among others.
Originally posted on November 14, 2016 @ 9:30 am