My pet hate is unnecessarily complex and elaborate forms. I also resent intrusive questions which have nothing to do with the page. If you are soliciting marketting information it is simple good manners to be up front about this. What I and hundreds of thousands like me resent is finding that your e-mail address has found it's way on somebody's list, and you find yourself receiving lots of unwanted junk e-mail.

Don't treat people like this. Give them a choice! If you are collecting addresses for lists be up front, give them a genuine option not to be included on any list, and then respect it.

I use a free form processing service http://response-o-matic.com which is very good. It allows you to define your own data fields, just so long as each submission carries your e-mail address, your visitor's e-mail address, and your visitor's name. In fact on one of my forms I send a dummy name for the visitor's e-mail address and offer them another text field if they opt to submit their address. The reason why I did this was that I wanted to hear what they felt about the site rather than to know what their e-mail address was. If they wanted to tell me that was up to them.

Just like design and graphics, don't use a form just to show off. If all you need is contact then using the <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]"> tag is simpler and more straight forward, and it allows the sender to keep a copy of the e-mail if that is their practice. Think about what you want to use a form for. Think about designing it to be as easy to use as possible, and don't burder people with too many compulsary fields. They'll lose patience with it and move on without submitting the form. That will be your loss, and not theirs!

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