Here you’ll find out about the options you have for creating your forms, as well as how to define your page properties and make multilingual forms available to your users.
Do you want create a completely new form that you can then design to suit your requirements? Then you need to start with an empty form. An empty form contains no form elements and all of its settings are set to default values.
Formcentric gives you a range of templates in several categories, which you can use to get started on creating the forms you need. You can then adjust the template content, design and settings to suit your individual requirements.
You have probably experienced the situation where you need a new form but you already have a similar form stored in your system. Perhaps only a few content items need to be swapped out or added. Copying an existing form can simplify your workflow significantly, because you do not need to redesign the entire form again. You simply copy a similar form and then you only need to rework the areas that are different in your new form.
You can create a translation of an existing form if you want to make your form available in another language. The form to be translated is copied and linked to the new form. You can then translate the new form. You can of course also adjust your form fields to suit different requirements – if this is needed because of localisation, for example. To find out more about form translations, see our post Providing a form in several languages.
If you find yourself creating one kind of form a lot, such as a registration form, you can save this as a template and use it as the default form for your new forms. With the template as your starting point, you don’t have to create a form from scratch every time you need one.
A form that is too long and wide-ranging tends to put users off quickly – with the result that they simply give up halfway through. For this reason, we recommend that you create a form with multiple pages if you need to ask your users to input a lot of information. With a multi-page form, you not only boost your conversion rate but also improve usability, because users are not presented with all the form fields at the same time but can be guided step-by-step through the process of form completion.
The page properties allow you to configure some general settings for a form page. You can give the page a heading, for example, and specify the text that should be shown on the ‘Next’ and ‘Back’ buttons in the case of multi-page forms. You can also add JavaScript code, which lets you create dependencies between entries made in multiple form fields, for example, or use conditions that specify when a form page should be shown or hidden. Formcentric automatically numbers each new page that you add to a form. You can use this numbering scheme to immediately identify the individual pages in the form tree. Click a page to open and edit its page properties.
If you’re looking to add more languages to an existing form, Formcentric makes this easy to do. In Formcentric, you can create translations of forms so that users are automatically provided with the form in the language set by their browser. If you add a translation, then a copy of the form is created. Unlike normal copies, however, Formcentric links the translations together. The translations of a form go hand-in-hand and make up a single unit. When the form is accessed, Formcentric provides the translation that matches the configured browser language. If no translation is available for a particular browser language, then users are provided with the form in the language that you have set as the default language for the form.
