Today, a contact form is an obligatory part of any web presence. Hardly any website can do without this simple way of getting in touch with the site visitors, regardless of whether the visitor wants to leave a message or get more information about what the homepage has to offer. Of course, the site visitor could also write an email message, but a website form is quickly filled out and thus makes for a smaller barrier to contact. Furthermore, it makes it so that the email address does not have to be made public, thereby reducing abuse of the system, e.g., for spam delivery.
Creating a contact form and integrating it into the HTML code of the website is usually done quickly. But the technical implementation for processing the form input and the fact that most people prefer delivery via email notification both require some technical competencies. Either you operate the website with a CMS (Content Management System), which provides the necessary functionality, or you program a script yourself, for example, with the script language PHP. Alternatively, you can install a FormMailer. With all these options, there are countless pitfalls and possible problems that can stand in the way of reliable operation. For example, there are often problems setting up PHP scripts and FormMailers for flawless operation, or the email notifications with the form entries do not arrive reliably or are sorted out as spam.
form.taxi offers an uncomplicated and stable solution for this. It takes over the entire shipment processing of any HTML form. All you need to do is insert the sending address into the HTML form that is provided by form.taxi. This means that the transfer of the submission, including all technical operations, such as spam filtering, storage of the form entries, including any file uploads, and notification by email, is handled by form.taxi. When creating the form in HTML with the desired input fields and the desired styling in CSS, the site owner still retains all freedom.
Setup of a contact form
Let’s use an example to demonstrate how a contact form is set up in just a few steps and made functional with form.taxi.
HTML markup
The following HTML code is for the form shown above. You can reuse this code for your project and include it on your website. You can customize the code according to your requirements and, you can even add more input fields.
<form action="INSERT-SEND-ADDRESS" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8">
<fieldset>
<p>
<label for="input-name">Name</label>
<input id="input-name" name="Name" required type="text" style="display:block;width: 100%;box-sizing:border-box;">
</p>
<p>
<label for="input-email">Email address</label>
<input id="input-email" name="Email" required type="email" style="display:block;width: 100%;box-sizing:border-box;">
</p>
<p>
<label for="input-message">Message</label>
<textarea id="input-message" name="Message" required rows="5" style="display:block;width: 100%;box-sizing:border-box;"></textarea>
</p>
<input type="text" name="_gotcha" value="" style="display:none;">
</fieldset>
<p style="text-align:right;">
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</p>
</form>If HTML is new territory for you, or if you need more information about creating forms in HTML, you will find detailed knowledge at selfHTML to dive deeper into the matter.
Design of the form
The appearance of the form is customized with CSS and can thus be adapted to the design of the website. Your web designer will certainly know about this. If you are freshly starting web designing in CSS yourself, you can find an introduction to this at MDN Web Docs.
Connect to form.taxi
In order to submit the form with the form.taxi service, you just have to insert an individual sending address into the HTML code of the form page. You will get this address when you register the form at form.taxi (user account required). The sending address is inserted in the HTML code in the action attribute of the form tag (see 1st line of the sample code).
If you do not yet have a user account with form.taxi, start on the home page with the registration of your form. This will create a personal and free user account for you and you will get the sending address for use with your form.
If you already have your own user account, log into the panel and create your new form under the menu item Forms. The individual sending address is displayed on the panel in the form settings and can be inserted in the HTML code of your form page.
After inserting the sending address into the HTML code, your form is ready for use! Settings for form submission, can be made from the panel of form.taxi. There you can also view the submissions received with all form entries and, if required, export them for further use in various file formats.
For further information on how to use form.taxi, please refer to the documentation. If you need personal assistance setting up your form or using form.taxi, you are also welcome to contact us by email at support@form.taxi.