Form Design Cribsheet

From NewHaven Software Wiki

The graphic below illustrates some of the principles to keep in mind when creating customer facing forms on your site. Having smooth and easy to understand forms on your site can help lower cart abandonment and prevent a lot of user frustration. If you are using eCMS you can use CSS to style any of your forms. We often use existing frameworks and plugins to achieve design/function requests. Below are some of the most common ones. As always, if you have questions please contact support

Frameworks:

• http://formee.org/demo/index.htm - An easy to use and small framework just for forms.

• http://blueprintcss.org/ - A larger framework that does a lot to equalize typography, layout, and forms. You can use the whole framework or parts. Example page at http://blueprintcss.org/tests/parts/forms.html

• http://formalize.me/ - Small CSS and JavaScript library that aims to normalize forms across all browsers. Uses JavaScript to add support for older browsers that do not support HTML5.

• http://sprawsm.com/uni-form/ - Another form framework that's easy to use and offers numerous styling options. Example page http://sprawsm.com/uni-form/styles/

• http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ This is a large framework built by Twitter. Be forewarned it's "for nerds, by nerds".

Validation:

• http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation - A well written and versatile client side validation library (depends on jQuery).

Buttons:

• http://www.cssbuttongenerator.com/ Great cross-browser CSS based button generator. An easy and quick way to style all of your submit buttons.