You may not know it yet, but the forms you place on your web site might be scaring off potential customers and clients. To kick start your web site into higher conversation per visit its best to test drive your contact us, order, or ezine subsciption page. These forms are great ways to gather information on your customers. Without proper test drives your customers might leave your site out of frustration and you’ll be left in the dust.

Some of the following mistakes in designing your web forms might be hurting you more than you might think.

1) Forcing Repeat Work: If you’re inputing certain required fields, often denoted by an asterix, without giving your customers a good notification they might end up hitting submit and having to fill out the whole form again. They won’t click the back button 9 times out of 10. Be sure to keep your forms simple and not treat them like a census collection. A fax, pager, home, and work number might be an overkill for your web form.

2) Various Contact Methods: Web forms are often run on php scripts and your customers won’t have any idea where the form was submitted to. You might not be providing them with more than the web form to contact you. Give your customers the option to call or email you directly instead of relying on a structured web form only.

3) Requiring Too Much Information: Is it really necessary to your web form’s purpose to require a person’s company title, mailing address, log-in and password? Do they really have the time to fill out unnecessary information on your web form. If not, you could be losing potential customers for good once they leave your web site out of frustration. Either remove these fields or list them as optional.

4) Restricting Text Fields: Never restrict the length of a text field unless it’s for a username or password. Long names and even longer emails require long text fields for your visitors.

5) Not Offering A Newsletter: Use a small checkbox to ask permission for your visitors to receive weekly newsletters on your upcoming events and specials.

6) Not Asking Your Visitors How They Found You: Use an optional drop down box on your web form to gather information on where your conversion customers are coming from. That is, the customers who come to your site looking to buy!