Importance of forms

We include in our monthly report the forms you receive. This is a raw count and doesn’t look at the details. We include the numbers because forms are a quick way of looking at how your site is doing.

Forms are a way that visitors can communicate with you. We always put forms on websites rather than email addresses. This is to ensure that your email address doesn’t end up being hit with spam all of the time. It also has the benefit that you can have different forms delivered to different people for different events (at Websites4Christians we’re happy to set up extra email addresses for you).

Examining how forms are being used can give you some insight into how visitors think of your website. For example when you set up a page for the summer club do you include a registration form which allows the visitor to register their children? If you did was it well used or did people turn up without a completed form?

You’ll find that people don’t like filling in forms. They find it hard work especially if you put lots and lots of fields on the form. So you should look at your forms in conjunction with the time on page statistics. That is the detailed statistics for the form page. How long did the people spend on the page? Does the number of visits tally with the number of forms received etc?

In general looking at the forms statistics tends to be important when you have events or when you are pushing for visitor feedback. Whilst it’s interesting at other times to find out the number of contact forms it’s perhaps not as vital as knowing how your directed visitor reacted to your form. So when you look at the statistic on the monthly report please take into account what you’re doing to reach new people and relate that to how many forms you’ve received.