A "Contact Us" Information Gathering Form

Learning how to use and manage simple event types is very worthwhile. Although it takes a little bit of time to learn how to create these forms, over-time they can save a tremendous amount of time by organizing and capturing customer inquiries in a standard way. In this example, we will look at how to create a simple “Contact Us” form in detail. We will use as an example the “Contact Us” form that appears on the NeatClubs.COM web-site.

We will also examine how once the form is created, we can link the form to a prominent “Contact Us” graphic appearing on the side-panel of the web-site making it more likely that visitors to our web-site will find the contact us form as shown in Figure XXX.

Creating the new “Contact” Us event

When logged in as an administrator on the web-site, select the “Create an Event” option from the “Calendar & Events” menu as shown in figure XXX.

You will then see the screen in figure XXX asking you to define the name of the event as well as the type of event that most closely describes the on-line experience or registration activity that you are trying to create. For the “Contact Us” event that we are wanting to create, the description of the event type that best fits our situation is “Conduct Survey or Gather Information (user need not be logged in)” so we select that option as shown in Figure XXX. After we have given the event a name and selected the type of event, after we press the “Save Changes” button additional options will appear allowing us to customize the properties of this event as shown in figure XXX.

The event properties that are most relevant for this type of event where there is no on-line payment involved, and users do not need to have member accounts on our web-site to participate are the “Event Description” and the “Setup Data Collection Fields” section.

In our simple example, we’ll go ahead and setup those event properties to get the behavior we want in our “Contact Us” style form.

Modifying the Event Properties

First, click on the “Event Description” item under the Event Properties section to edit the description of the event. Rather than provide a long description for what is a very simple form, we’re going to instruct the system so “skip the description” when displaying this form to visitors to the web-site. This is done by simple setting the “Skip this description when presenting the activity or calendar entry to a web-site user” to “yes” as shown in Figure XXX. After this, click “Save & Return” to make sure that this change gets saved in the Database.

Next, select the Event Property, “Setup Data Collection Fields”. A screen line the one shown in figure XXX will appear. You should answer the question “Do you wish to define your own custom form to gather additional data?” to Yes. This will be the default setting for this event type. In the editor window, you can enter some text or graphics that you would like to have appear on top of the data form that the user is asked to fill in. In our example, we have been created and have uploaded and incorporated a graphical element from our web-sites photo gallery to display a stylized graphic when users visit the Contact Us page.

Further down on that same screen, we have the opportunity to describe in detail all the questions that will be asked on the data collection form. Note that because this form does not require users to be logged in, the system will insist on minimally collected a Name, E-Mail address and Phone Number. For this reason the first three fields will be auto-populated for this type of event. For other types of events where it will be assumed that a respondent is logging in to register, or creating an account on your system at the same time as they register, there will be no need for this contact information so these three fields will not be populated. Note that the reason the system will insist on having this information is that it needs to be able to send a confirmation e-mail to anybody who fills in a form on your web-site.

Figure XXX shows how these fields are developed. Note that you can have up to fifty fields on a form and you can select the fields to edit in groups of ten. You should save the contents of one group of fields before going to the next. The meaning of the fields are as follows:

Active: this simply means that the field is in use. Active should be ticked automatically when you enter a definition for a field. Any field that is set to active must have a label or heading defined as well as descriptive text or an error will occur when you try to save the form.

Type: This refers to the type of data that you want to gather. Valid data types for gathering data in forms are:

?        Text

?        Date

?        Yes/No

?        Numeric

?        Free Format

?        Multiple Choice Select

?        Radio Box Picklist (pick one)

?        Radio Box Picklist (pick many)

?        Level 1 Heading

?        Level 2 Heading

?        Text Caption or Explanation

?        Simple Checkbox

While many of these are self explanatory, others require more explanation. For a full explanation of what these fields are used for, please see Appendix A where all of the event properties are explained. In our simple example we are using only the Text fields and some Multiple Choice  select fields. Suffice it to say that these fields types used in combination can allow you to create some very sophisticated forms.

Label / Heading: This fields can actually have two meanings. Normally it contains the text that will appear beside a field when your form is presented on the screen. If we are using a “Level 1 Heading” or “Level 2 Heading” field type however, the text in this field will be presented in a large font to logically segment parts of a long form.

Length: The Length is only relevant for the Text and Numeric field types. For other field types the system will take control of formatting on it’s own in order to try and optimize the appearance of the form presented on the screen. You can simply leave this field set at it’s default

Description / Text: This field has a double meaning as well. Normally this is where you would provide special instructions to help a user complete a field. These instructions will be easily accessible to users when they fill in the on-line form. For the “Text Caption or Explanation” field type, explanatory longer amounts of text can be inserted into this field and will be displayed as a part of the form.

Required: Setting a field as “Required” means that a response must be entered for this field before the form can be submitted. You may decide that some collection fields are not essential. Be careful with “Yes / No” fields. The nature of these types of fields is that you will always get a value, so it is impossible to know whether the user agreed with what was on the form, or just did not bother to change it. Setting required with these multi-choice types of fields is redundant since by their very nature they will always return a value.

Choices: The choices file is valid for the “Multiple Choice Select”, “Radio Box Picklist (pick one)” and “Radio Box Picklist (pick many)” field types. If you are specifying a field where there will be multiple choices you need to provide a comma separated list of the available choices. Please avoid using punctuation such as apostrophes, quotes or additional commas which can confuse the system and cause the choices to be mis-interpreted.

Once you have completed for definition of the Form as shown in Figure XXX, you can save this Form and click “Return” to go back to the “Create or Update On-line Event” screen. The final setting that you may want to ensure is properly set for this type of form is the e-mail address to send responses to. To configure this setting, select “Registration Configuration”. As shown in Figure XXX you should indicate that you wish to be notified of responses and indicate the e-mail address that notifications will be sent to. Every time someone fills in the form, you will be sent an e-mail with the details of their inquiry. Additionally, all responses will be stored in the database so that they can be reviewed by the administrator or downloaded in CSV format under “View Event Responses” in the “Calendar & Events” menu.

If you want this form to be “live” and accepting registrations on the web, you should ensure that the “Is this event currently Locked to avoid registrations?” setting is set to “No”. Next you can save this screen and return to the main

Congratulations! If you’ve followed these steps successfully you should create a simple Contact Us style inquiry form with your own data fields.

12.1.3        Testing our Contact Us Registration Form

Normally visitors to your web-site will access one of these “events” defined in the system in one three ways.

1.        They will click on a hypertext link or click on a graphic in one of your web pages that takes them directly to the event.

2.        They will select a menu items that links them directly to the event

3.        They may click on an advertisement or “Featured Events” entry on left or right side panel of your web-site that will take them directly to the event

4.        Or they may reference your event from an external web-site that links to your event using a well defined event naming convention:

http://websitename.com/event.php?id=XX

Every event managed by your web-site will have a unique event identification number. The ID number of your event will be visible when the administrators view of the event listing shown in figure XXX below. Other sections of this documentation explain how to link to events from menus, web pages and advertisements as well as external sites.

After you have created your event, you can click on icon on the left hand side of the display shown in Figure XXX to simulate the experience that a user will have when they register for your event. With any luck, when you “run” this event, it will present the on-line for similar to what is shown in figure XXX and allow you to register.