Forms on a bio page

A form is a negotiation conducted entirely in silence. You ask for things; the person decides, without telling you, whether the total is worth it. If it is not, they leave, and you learn nothing about why.

The consequence is that you never see the cost of a field. You see the submissions you got, all of which have every field filled in, which makes every field look like it was free. The people who would have contacted you with two fields and did not with six are invisible.

So the discipline has to come from the other direction: assume every field costs you something, and make each one argue for itself.

Roughly in order of how well they pay for themselves.

Nearly always worth it

• Email address. The whole point. Without it there is no next step.
• A message box. One open field does more than five structured ones, because people tell you what they actually want rather than what your categories allow.

Sometimes worth it

• Name. Cheap, and it makes the reply better. Ask for "name", not first and last as separate fields, which doubles the cost for nothing.
• One choice field, if it genuinely changes how you respond. "What is this about" with three options can route an enquiry. Six options is a menu, and menus make people think.
• Budget or date, for freelance and event work, where a mismatch wastes both sides' time. Ranges rather than exact numbers: people will not commit to a figure with a stranger.

Rarely worth it

• Phone number. Expensive, for a specific reason: a share of people will not hand one to somebody they have not met, and rather than leaving it blank they abandon the form. Only include it if you will actually call, and say so next to it.
• Company, job title, website. Almost always curiosity rather than need. You can look these up after they write.
• "How did you hear about us". You want this and it is not worth what it costs. Your analytics already know, more accurately than somebody's recollection.

There is one more rule that matters as much as the count: put the easiest field first. Starting with an email address is a small commitment and people begin. Starting with "tell us about your project" is a blank page, and a blank page is where people decide to come back to it later.

Forms are built on laptops and filled in on phones. Nearly every avoidable failure in this section comes from that gap.

1. The keyboard covers the form. On a small screen the on-screen keyboard takes half the height, so a field near the bottom vanishes as it is focused. Fill your own form in on your own phone and watch what happens to the submit button.
2. The wrong keyboard appears. An email field should bring up the keyboard with the @ on it. If it opens the plain alphabet, the field is not declared as an email field, and every person typing an address is being made to work for no reason.
3. Autofill does not fire. Correctly marked fields let a phone fill in a name and an email in one tap. Unmarked fields turn a five-second form into a thirty-second one.
4. The tap targets are too small. Checkboxes and radio buttons at their default size are a genuine problem for a lot of people, and the ones who struggle do not report it, they leave.
5. Validation punishes rather than helps. Turning a field red while somebody is still typing it is hostile. Check on leaving the field, and say what would be correct rather than that this is wrong.

The form is the easy part. What decides whether an enquiry form is worth having is the next twenty-four hours.

• Confirm on the page, immediately. Not a redirect to a thank-you page they did not ask for. A line where the form was, saying it arrived and when they will hear back.
• Say when, and mean it. "I reply within two days" sets an expectation you can meet. Silence sets one you cannot.
• Reply fast, or the rest was pointless. For anything commercial, the difference between replying in an hour and replying in two days is most of the outcome. People enquire with more than one person.
• Make sure it reaches you. Submissions that land in an inbox you check monthly, or a spam folder, are worse than no form: somebody made an effort and got silence, and they will not do it twice.

That last one deserves a habit. Submit your own form once a month, from your own phone, with a real address. It takes a minute and it is the only way you find out that notifications stopped three weeks ago.

If the form is for signups rather than enquiries, collecting emails covers the promise and the first email. The page for freelancers puts an enquiry form in the order that suits selling work, and why is no one clicking covers the case where nobody is reaching the form at all.