Recently a client came to us to help them out with the fact visitors to their site were not completing an request for information form out a vast majority of the time. They were also getting a lot of spam, or at least they think was spam because it was hard to sort incomplete forms submissions from the spam chatter. The solution is to give the form verification to the form submission.

The first step was to swamp out the previous PHP mailer forms with the new one. I did his, because I had come across a nice new mailer PHP script that has a verification function built into and it was simple enough to convert their form to the more input heavy one the client needed. This form can be found at The Web Help site, at the link below, with very simple one page code illustrated instruction page. An additional bonus is the built-in passing of the senders IP address with the form data. I was really satisfied with the ease of use and quick turnaround of the conversion of their from to my needs, and this script will defiantly go right into the code snippet tool box.

Now, the second part came along after further client review an input came the additional requirement of input field validation. Well, had I been good with my PHP I am sure i could have done this server side or a mix of client-side and server-side PHP coding ( stop laughing – I am after all a designer slowly learning more developer stuff). I also like to find and add small script pieces to my code tool kit that I can pull an apply as needed on the fly rather than recoded features.

To accomplish this, I found after hunting around an amazingly simple little system that required just the addition of two functions in the header, re-setting the form ID, and identifying the input fields that required verification. The JavaScript is poetic in its simplicity and uses the system pop-up note box and tells the user what required field they failed to complete. Sometimes you just have to hammer a site visitor over the head to get their attention. Now the funny things after all that, i re-found a forgotten build in function in Dreamweaver MX , which is also in the CS3 version for form element verification (read duh).

Now with the form fields validated as not empty prior to from submission, and the enhanced image validation features activated both task were completed. I was a little behind schedule but both of the clients needs were address in a very user friendly way and two new code snippet added to the kit as well as re-learned a built-in feature in Dreamweaver!!! Double vision – Double solution

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