Most of the websites require forms to get information from website visitors. If you own a website and have a need to display a form, then you can either display forms that adhere to standards and conventions or you can display fancy forms. Beautifully illustrated forms reflect your creativity. Moreover, a website with fancy forms that sound natural tend to attract users’ attention quickly than boring forms.

As virtual space is growing day by day, having your own creative space that can be differentiated from others is worthy. When you choose a beautifully illustrated form, you need to consider quite a few factors like website theme, overall color scheme, and the website layout because displaying a nice-looking form in a wrong place may not be that attractive. There are two major steps in fancy form designing. They are

1) Designing the actual layout of the form

2) Deciding on the technology

1) Factors to consider while designing a form:

The major reason to have a form is to encourage site visitors to leave comments. So if the forms can reflect your website theme in a light manner, then users would feel encouraged to leave a comment. Many times, website visitors do not enter information if the forms are straightforward and show strict procedures and rules that have to be followed when entering comments. So the time and effort that you spend on designing beautifully illustrated forms are much worthy than going for standard layout.

Irrespective of a website theme, it would be better if a fancy form is simple and thought provoking. When you choose a design, it is also necessary to keep the technical complexities in your mind. Choosing a complex design with great artwork would not only confuse users but would also increase the development time. There are no hard and fast rules to create beautiful forms. If you think from a visitor’s perspective, then you can easily land up with cool designs.

2) Technical factors behind beautifully illustrated forms:

A fancy form that can reflect your website theme or the people behind is great to have on a website. But, its technical side may not be as simple as it may look. This is especially important if you want to optimize your website for SEO purpose. As web crawlers rely on certain standards to index a site, you may have to consider those before you decide on the technical aspects. However, if you already have regular stream of visitors and do not bother about increasing the traffic to your website, then this may not be a bottleneck.

a) ActionScript to create beautiful forms:

When it comes to creating lively form design, the technology that comes to the mind of all web designers is flash. Flash’s ActionScript allows designers to create lively forms and other interactive features in a website. The major advantage is web designers need not bother about cross-browser compatibility. This is a certainly a time-saver when compared to other technologies. On the down side, users have to wait little longer than usual for a page to load. Moreover, if you rely on SEO to generate traffic to your website, then you can better stay away from flash-based content as most of the web crawlers do not index flash-based web pages. However, if you are a student or an artist who wish to exhibit your creativity, then you can go for flash to create beautifully illustrated designs.

b) HTML and CSS to create beautiful forms:

Even though many new web technologies have mushroomed, HTML and CSS still remain powerful. With CSS, you can easily create fancy forms and reuse the style elsewhere. Moreover, all search engines are HTML and CSS friendly. So you need not bother about web crawlers rejecting your webpage. The disadvantages of using this technology aren’t many. The only limitation is the complexity of the actual form design because unlike flash-based development, a designer has to code the style rules to create the actual design. This can also increase the testing and development time.

There are no hard and fast rules on the web. With everyone having their own virtual space, one of the ways to differentiate your site from others is to go for beautifully illustrated fancy forms. Standards and conventions are necessary but they need not intervene with your creativity. After all, virtual spaces are run by people, so why not reflect their attitude using fancy forms.