Web forms can be an effective way of engaging your website visitors, but mistakes with Squarespace form blocks could quickly go amiss.
Squarespace’s built-in form blocks don’t allow you to efficiently filter spam responses or integrate with services like 17hats; fortunately, you can bypass these constraints.
Headings
Squarespace’s form blocks provide a powerful way of creating web forms on your site, allowing you to collect feedback, contact information or other types of data from visitors to your website. Form blocks have been designed for ease of use by anyone, and integrate perfectly into the rest of Squarespace platform – but should your needs exceed those provided by Squarespace itself, there are third-party tools that may offer additional capabilities.
Squarespace provides more than the standard form blocks; in addition to them they also offer special blocks designed specifically for newsletter signups and lead magnets. While similar, these specialized blocks work separately from their form block counterparts to help create more effective pages on your website. They’re easy to use while fitting seamlessly with all of the content on your page.
Similarly, you can align form blocks vertically or horizontally on any given page to make them look more consistent with other content and enhance user experience. Squarespace offers another feature which allows users to simultaneously adjust multiple items at the same time such as text boxes and images – something which may come in very handy when aligning multiple pieces of content together.
Make your forms more recognizable by giving each form a name that relates to its location on a page – this will let users know what they’re filling out, as well as helping them locate it later. Pick something relevant like “Form of Page N. ” as this will ensure it gets completed easily by users.
Your forms allow you to also customize the fonts used for its fields and labels, enabling you to tailor them exactly as desired. To do so, edit a page containing your form field of interest before clicking Fonts to open up Site Styles menu – here, you can adjust font size as well as add custom fonts directly.
Text Formatting
Forms are an essential piece of software on any website, enabling visitors to respond with questions that provide us with valuable data that allows us to tailor content specifically for them. But sometimes it can be challenging knowing how to style a form correctly to complement its surrounding pages.
Squarespace provides us with some excellent tools for accomplishing this. Most content blocks offer horizontal and vertical alignment options that can be found by selecting the block and checking its quick design menu icon – making it simple to align text boxes, image boxes, and entire pages quickly and effortlessly.
Additionally to the formatting options in the quick design menu, you can also apply specific formatting to individual lines of text in a form using CSS. This feature can help make forms look more professional by bolding or italicizing specific words and phrases – giving a cohesive brand experience for users.
CSS allows form elements to be customized easily with CSS, such as titles, descriptions and form fields. If you want to change the title text on your form to something more attention-grabbing, using the style> tag is an effective way of doing it; also changing font size, color and more will take effect as part of this change.
Another way of adding style and functionality to your form is by including descriptions for each field. This helps visitors understand what information you require them to submit, as well as encourage more people to fill out your form. To do this, simply add this code into your style> tag:
CSS allows you to easily customize form submission buttons. This feature is especially helpful if you use a third-party service like 17hats for hosting your form and want the button to match the look and feel of your website. To achieve this effect, add this code:
There are additional ways to customize forms, but they require more advanced CSS skills. I will write another post detailing these options so stay tuned!
Padding
Squarespace makes creating web forms easy for anyone, regardless of technical skill. Forms are created using Squarespace’s block templates – content-laying out tools – to build forms with multiple types and functions – such as creating a newsletter signup form in just a few clicks, or designing a custom file upload form to collect large files from visitors. To get started creating forms on Squarespace, log in and navigate to your page where your form should appear before adding a new section and selecting Form as its block type.
From the form editor, you can select from various preset layouts designed to meet common forms types – for instance contact forms, email signup forms and online order forms. After selecting one of these layouts, you can customize its font size, text size, padding and corner radius according to your needs.
Your form can also be customized in terms of its color and background color. In addition, padding can be added at the top, bottom, left, and right of your form to provide users with some breathing room to focus on what they are doing without becoming distracted by other elements on the page.
If you want to take form customization a step further, using code snippets provided by the Form block could be the way. To do this, launch Chrome Dev Tools and click on the triangle with an arrow icon – this opens up the inspector so that you can edit CSS for your Squarespace website. It is important that before beginning to edit CSS for your Squarespace website it is understood the difference between padding and margin, with padding being the space between an element’s border and itself while margin refers to space outside this border.
Final step when creating a form block: selecting where your collected information goes and gets stored. Squarespace provides four storage options under its Storage tab: email, Google Drive, Mailchimp and Zapier. Zapier adds more possibilities by enabling you to set up workflows between your form block and another app or service – for instance connecting Pipedrive so when someone fills out your form online a deal is automatically created in Pipedrive with all details prefilled if someone completes one of your forms on your website!
Borders
Add borders to your form to enhance its visual appeal and give it more structure. Borders serve two functions; first they create an outline around one or more sides of an element’s boundary; secondly they take up space which pushes content against their edges – which you can do using Squarespace’s Style panel.
One of the greatest advantages of Squarespace’s forms block is that it enables you to build web forms quickly without using third-party tools, allowing you to collect visitor data more efficiently while matching their look with that of your site.
However, Squarespace’s forms block has some restrictions that can be frustrating at times. For instance, visitors cannot upload files with their responses in response to your form; an option would come in handy for job applications, resumes and samples of work submission.
But with some creative CSS, you can overcome these restrictions and make Squarespace forms look more inviting. We have put together a quick video tutorial showing you how to add borders around forms so they stand out on pages.
Cinnamon Wolfe from Flodesk recently shared an easy Squarespace hack to add boxed text effects to forms in Squarespace. This can be an effective way of emphasizing specific text on forms or even for testimonials or quotes.
To add a boxed text effect to a Squarespace form, first open the Form Editor and click “Share,” followed by “Embed,” to select and copy inline code from Flodesk. Afterward, log into your Squarespace account and edit the page where the form should appear, adding a new section with this code from Flodesk before saving and refreshing to see your form appear!
