Memo to webdesigners

[lederhosen]

When designing forms, give some thought to their intended function. For instance, if designing a form like this for people to report scams, what would be a reasonable cap for a field labelled 'Comments, copies of emails etc'?"

(a) 500 characters, or
(b) More than 500 characters?

(Before answering, you may want to count how many characters are contained just in the headers of a typical scam email.)

#2: When placing a length cap on a form field, ask yourself when potential users would like to be informed of that cap. Do you think that would be:

(a) After writing up a description of the attempted scam, pasting in full message with headers, and hitting 'submit', or
(b) Before writing up a description of the attempted scam, pasting in full message with headers, and hitting 'submit'?

Scoring: If you answered 'b' to both of the above questions, congratulations! You may be competent to design a website.

If you answered 'a' to either of the above questions, please bang your head against a large solid object. Possibly your computer, since you evidently don't deserve to have one. HTH. HAND.

Comments

Welcome to the wonderful world of web-design.

[tamahori]

I used to, in the far off days, do this kind of thing commercially (which is to say I got paid for it) I also did it, as I would term it, professionally (which is to say, b to both questions).

Sad to say, 'professional' and 'commercial' don't seem to have much of a link these days.

One of the reasons I got kind of sick of the whole mess.


Brett