When AJAX meets a contact form…

February 26th, 2007

So, I have been busy with my full time job lately and when I get home its a bit of a struggle to get back in gear so that I can work on the site. I am a very persistent guy – so I’m battling through it.

I’ve been wanting to create my contact form for the past 2 weeks but getting the time has been difficult. I am glad to say it is now complete. I do have a basic concern that it is not 100% spam protected so I will be relying on my emails spam filter to catch the most of it until I can address the issue in the future. At the moment it is more important to have some facility for feedback than none at all.

It is currently a simple run of the mill contact form. A user enters their name, email address x2, selects a subject and then fills in their question/request. This is as good as it gets. Its how it works in the background that I am wanting to change.

An AJAX implementation is now the standard for all websites to achieve and I am setting my sites on converting mcnicholl.com to meet that standard.

Initially I will work my way through converting the contact form. This will be a fun beginning as I will be essentially learning AJAX from scratch.

The benefits should be obvious to any programmers reading, but for those who are not so fortunate – here is a brief highlight of the reasons one might AJAX-ify their website :

Increased usability
- More responsive to user actions (since the whole page is not refreshed)
- User actions can be completed quicker
- Maintains the same user interface
More Practical
- Reduce download repetitions (reducing the need to download the same images/text/flash for each page)
- Less bandwidth consumption (reduces hosting costs)

When I have completed the transformation of the contact form, I will explain its process here. I have a feeling I am going to make everything – an AJAX application.

3 comments so far - Add yours »

Categories: AJAX, Website