Forms can be one of the most important parts of a website, as they provide the point of contact between the user of the site and the people behind the site. Making a form that is easy to use and understand is not an exact science, but there are plenty of tips, tricks and best practices out there.
Luke Wroblewski provides an excellent roundup of different methods being used around the web to provide help with forms. Definitely worth reading as it is a nice collection of patterns to solve the form help issue.
Using some images to capture the different strategies, he provides the good and bad of each method, concluding that there is no right answer, which method you use is user and situation dependent.
An excellent example of how to use unobtrusive JavaScript for error checking a form prior to submission. The work is available for download, and at the end of the article is provided a sample form and some exercises to help with your understanding with implementing unobtrusive JavaScript on forms.
Roger Johansson has an in depth, 2 part look at styling form controls across the different operating systems and browsers. A worthy read if you have ever tried to wrangle submit buttons and input boxes into some form of consistency across browsers while trying to tweak their looks.
Simple a huge linkdump on things related to making forms. Well worth picking thru this page if you are researching methods and best practises for building forms.
The good folks over at Particletree provide this useful little examination and tutorial of the differences between using an <input type="submit" versus the more versatile <button> element.
They provide some screenshots and sample html and CSS to help you get started on styling up better looking form buttons, which can even include images inside the button itself. Also see some good discussion in the comments.
Particletree provides ten tips that can be used when designing a form for your website. Some of this is common sense, some of this is mandated by the W3C, and other bits are useful in certain case situations. If you haven't put much thought into building forms in the past or done any research on best practises, this is a great place to start.
A short weblog post about styling form widgets, including a nice looking example of how to add some style to form submit buttons.
Luke Wroblewski writes an excellent, well illustrated piece about form design.
He covers form layout and the use of visual elements to discuss how we can make our forms easier to scan and understand, and hopefully a lot less painful to fill out.
Wow, I've only had a quick look, but this is just amazing. Not only a super useful tool to help you build a form that follows the principle of progressive enhancement : unobtrusive, cross-browser and degradable
, but the app itself uses a heavy dose of xmlHttpRequest. Definitely worth checking out - note that at the time of posting, it's in beta.