Contact Forms
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Troubleshooting - Not Receiving Forms?
Contents |
Tutorial Video
Adding a Contact Form
Contact Forms are added to your website to create an easy way for visitors to send you information or inquiries. Each form consists of multiple fields that a user can fill out, that are then e-mailed directly to the e-mail address that you use to log in to your Showit account.
To add a form, click the
button in the bottom left hand corner below the Pages panel. Then select “Contact Forms”.
You will then have the option of adding four different styles of forms. Each of these form layouts are fully editable.
- Basic Form – A very standard form that includes the fields: Name, Email, Phone and, Comments.
- Detailed Form – A more detailed form that includes fields that are intended to collect more information from a prospective client. Field include: Name, Email, Phone, Date of Event, Event Location, Budget, How did you hear about us and, Comments.
- Stacked Form – Includes the same fields as the “Basic Form”, but is laid out differently.
- Details Inside – Includes the same fields as the “Basic Form”, but the labels for each field is inside the text entry box.
Click the "Add Page" button to add it to your site.
Advanced Form Properties
You can also create more fields or your own custom form by adding Text Boxes to your site and then adjusting the "Form Properties" on the advanced tab. It is helpful to understand that each field in the Contact Form templates are just basic Text Boxes that have the Enable Input option selected. Keep in mind that all form fields must be on the page and not on the Style Group as any form fields on a Style Group will be ignored. If you set your form to submit but no fields are on a Page, nothing will be submitted.
- Single Line – Though this isn’t a part of the Form Properties, it is important to check this box whenever you are creating your own form that has a single line of text. This will ensure that when a user enters text into the text field, the text will stay on one continuous line instead of starting a new line after reaching the edge of the box. If you are doing a comments box that should have multiple lines, you can leave this box unchecked.
- Enable Input – Checking this box will turn a standard text box into a box where you can input text.
- Required – Checking this box will make it so the user cannot submit the form until they fill out this field.
- In Subject? – Checking this box will make it so that whatever is typed into this text box will additionally be added into the subject of the e-mail you receive. This is a great option to help organize your incoming emails.
- Reply To? – Because the emails come from your Showit Site and not directly from the user, you will need to check this box for the text field that you will have the user type their email into. This will make it so that when you hit the “reply” button on the email you receive from a user, it will be sent to whatever email address is entered into this text field.
- Label – Whatever you enter into this text box will show up in the emails you receive before the text that the user has inputted. This is a good way to organize your incoming forms and make them easier to read. For instance, if the text field is for the users name, it would be a good idea to label the box “Name” so that when you receive the email it will say “Name: John Smith” instead of just “John Smith”.
- Tab Index – The "Tab Index" provides the order in which text fields are selected on the form when a user hits the tab key. By default the tab order flows top to bottom, left to right. By setting up tab indexes on text fields, you could cause the focus to jump to whatever field you want to next. You could cause the focus to move from right to left. If no tab indexes are set it would go 1,2,3,6,5,4 following the left to right, top to bottom default flow.
Submit Form
To submit a form, you must have a layer setup as a link to another page on your site. This would typically be a page that you create to thank your site visitor for submitting the form or direct them to another page. Once you have a page selected as a link, you have the option to check the box for "Submit Form". Now, when this layer is clicked, all the Text Boxes marked with "Enable Input" will be packaged up and sent to the email address used for the site login account.
Not Receiving Forms?
FIRST, please check the following list for formatting errors.
- Extra text boxes checked as required are floating around the page (check layers list)
- Text boxes CANNOT use scroll bars
- Be sure to check your spam box before contacting support. Search spam for "noreply@showitfast.com"
TOP 3 Errors:
*1. Your SUBMIT button is not linked to a page on your site and checked ON to Submit Form under the Link settings.
*2. You Unsubscribed from our mailing list (probably by accident) by clicking the bottom link of an email from us.
*3. The SPAM Monster Ate Your Email
- Add noreply@showtifast.com to your web based address book in addition to your desktop based address book to avoid having these messages filtered to into your spam box.
Different Email Address
The email address used to send a contact form submission is the account email used for email and cannot be different from that email. This is because we are using SailThru as a third party to deliver mail and they work with email companies to make sure their emails get delivered. In order to use this service, they have rules in place that we have to abide by to prevent sending spam through their system which is why we use the verified email with your account.
To change the email account associated with your Showit account, Login to your Showit Account through the getit store, click on My Account then click View or change my account information and then change the email address and click Update. You will then need to Logout and log back into Showit with the new email address to complete the update process.
This is a highly requested feature and is on our list of features we want to implement, especially with +Sites. For now, another work around is to use something like Filters in GMail to automatically forward email intended for a client onto the client. You could label a field in your form with a unique word that you could then use to filter on to forward the email to a client.







