Principles in Design of PHP Contact Forms

PHP contact forms are a popular way for webmasters and businesses to get valuable feedback from their readers or clients. For a business, it can mean saving money or getting suggestions on how to improve the current business model. For webmasters, it opens a door to a new means of interaction with visitors.

A PHP contact form should be accessible to anyone- so do watch usage of JavaScript or AJAX. Not every browser will support these technologies, which could effectively render your contact form useless. There are certain methods of "gracefully degrading" your contact form- but do know that it will take a lot of extra work in allowing both sides of the fence to make use of your form.

Do be sure to include some sort of form validation in the script so that you are better able to spot out problems before they occur. Notifying the user that they forgot to type in their email address, for instance, can be valuable in getting into contact with whoever wishes to contact you. This can also help you enforce users to give their names, so that you may address them politely in your reply.

A contact form should also be secure- so try to keep it safe from hackers or spammers. One method in keeping your PHP contact form safe from harm is to include what is called a "Captcha." This device will create an image of numbers, letters, or objects. Visitors then type this information in for verification, so that they prove that they are human and not just another spam robot.

Extra security tactics may include logging the IP address of the one submitting the feedback. This is not only helpful to help track down malicious users, but can also help businesses to track demographics of those submitting the form. By using geography software, one can easily find out where the visitor comes from only by looking at their IP address. This may help in building demographics information.

Remember to keep things simple with your PHP contact form. This will allow you to get in direct contact with your customers without troubling them with technologies their browsers don't support, or difficult anti-spam techniques that only frustrate human users. It is best to look around at your favorite websites and see what kind of contact forms they offer their visitors- and take your inspiration from several sources.

Closing Comments

If you aren't sure on how to code a PHP contact form, you should be able to find a wealth of code via different search engines. There are many code examples to choose from, both for beginners and experts alike, depending on what you need to accomplish.

Learn more about php contact form and learn php.