In this article I'll be providing a complete guide to website forms. I'll be covering what forms are and why they are so important when it comes to your website. Let's jump right in.

Forms are one of the most important things you can put on a website. They're used for people to communicate with you, capture data, and so many other things. Normally when people come to your site they're going to poke around for a minute, after that they're going to navigate away and will never find your site again. That's no good, that's why you need at least one form on your webiste.

You see forms give you a chance to collect some contact information from the people who visit your site. But forms are not just limited to capturing phone numbers and addresses. They can be used to capture all kinds of data and when it comes to WebStarts you can use that data to follow up and turn more of those website visitors into leads and customers.

Each for is made up of fields. Each field is a differnt piece of data. You can combile fields to make different types of forms. So of the most common uses of forms are.

1. Contact - Use this type of form to give people who come to your website a way to contact you via email. 

2. Email Subscription - Use this type of form to build an email list to send promotional materials, newsletters, and other follow up informatin.

3. Payment enabled - Use this type of field to accept variable payment amounts like donations as well as provide a way for people to send instruction along with a payment.

4. Questionnairs, surveys, feedback, and other uses - There are so many ways to use forms we can't cover them all here but a few other popular one's are ways to gather feedback through questionaires, surveys.

When combined fields make up your form. You can customize each field within your form. You can do things like change the label on the field, designate the data type that goes into the field, and even mark a field as required, so someone can only submit the form if certain fields are completed.

So what happens after someone submit a form on your website? Well, a window in their browser will pop-up and say they've successfully submitted the form. But if you really want to improve the experience you'll create a confirmation page.

A confirmation page is where people go after they submit a form.  Confimation pages are great because they let you send the person submitting the form to another page on your site. For example if you're selling a product you may first want to capture they're email. After the email is submitted you'll probably want to take them to a page where they can purhase the product you're selling.

WebStarts comes with a full fledged email marketing app and contacts app. These two apps work in conjunction with your forms. When creating a form you can designate an email list where you'd like the information to go. You can then use this data to send pre-written follow up emails at schedule intervals or send broadcast emails. Both are highly effective in bringing people back to your site and increasing conversion rates.

The Contacts app in WebStarts will let you build a database of contacts and forms are a perfect way to augment that data. Open the Contacts app and click on any contact and you'll see all type of data fields you can fill out for your contacts. But what's more you can add data fields by clicking the Add Fields link. Once you create these new data fields they can be added to your forms. When people complete those fields your Contacts are updated to reflect the newly captured data.

Payment enabled forms are perfect if you want to collect donations because you can add a field where someone can enter a variable dollar amount. They're also great if you're selling a product and the payment needs to be accompanied by instructions.

The WebStarts form builder comes with so many built-in features and options. You can protect your forms from spam by using captcha, you can set required fields, you can adjust field lengths and height, and of course you can style your form thousands of different ways. 

You can get started creating powerful custom forms and your very own free website at WebStarts.com. It's free to sign up.