Create User Friendly Confirmation Pages

Including a form on your website is the best way to get feedback from your visitors. You can have a form to gather your visitors' email address so that they can subscribe to your ezine. Or you can have a form to collect visitors' comments about your site. Also, forms allow your visitors to send you a request for a quote, or to send you all the necessary information when they want to buy your products or services.

In all these cases, you must design a confirmation page that will pop up after your visitors successfully fill up and submit a form. Unless you design a confirmation page, your visitors will be thrown into the generic confirmation page provided by your web host (usually an unsightly white screen displaying a convoluted plain text message written in a dated font type, that will most likely confuse your users and make them think that they have been thrown out of your site).

The confirmation page has several objectives:

1. It must clearly tell your users that the form was completed and sent successfully. For example, if the form is a subscription box for your newsletter or ezine, your confirmation page will say something like this: "Congratulations! You are now subscribed to our newsletter."
   
2. It must give clear instructions of what your visitor has to do next. To use the same subscription box example, your confirmation page will also say something like this: "You will soon receive an email message asking you to follow a link to activate your subscription. Follow that link to start receiving your ezine immediately".
   
3. It must provide your visitor with two or three navigation options so that he can continue browsing your site (don't just let him go…). Two popular options are: "Return to our main page" and "Browse our archives" (although depending on the size and the architecture of your site you can offer other options as well).

One important consideration is that your confirmation page must have the same look and feel as the rest of your pages, so that your visitor will know that he is still in your site.

Once you create your confirmation page, you must insert the necessary HTML code to your form script, so that the browser will automatically display your confirmation page once the form has been successfully submitted. You do this by adding the following code after the <form> tag at the beginning our your form script:

<input type="hidden" name="success" value="http://www.yoursite.com/confirmationpage.html">

Note:  some cgi programs (form handling programs) use the word "redirect" instead of "success" in their programs.  Check with your web host to see which one do they use.

P.S. If you want to see an example of a confirmation page, you can go to:

http://www.theinternetdigest.net/thankyou.html  

(This is the confirmation page we use after a visitor has successfully submitted to us an article for possible publication in our website. Notice how we have followed all the guidelines outlined in this article).

You can freely reprint this article.  Just include the following resource box at the end:

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ) a website and newsletter that gives you free advice on web design and Internet marketing.

Recommended Reading:

Defensive Design for the Web: How To Improve Error Messages,Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points: (by 37signals) The folks at world-class redesign firm 37signals have brought to life the topic of forms, error messages and 404 pages.  Following the tips in this book can make the difference between having one-time visitors and repeat customers.

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