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You should be familiar with the new HTML5 form elements from this  week’s reading, but if you need a refresher, this article about provides a good review (with plenty of screenshots) of the new elements. There are two examples of forms described in detail below. When you have finished reading, please: The first form I want to look at is Paypal’s account creation form: One of the things you would notice is that PayPal asks you for the  absolute minimum amount of information it needs to in order to continue  along the process of creating an account, a great strategy when you need  to gather a lot of information from people, but don’t want to scare  them away: I believe this form is successful because of the way Paypal gets you  to invest your self into the form so easily. Forms that are set up this  usually have people thinking: Paypal gets you to fill out 13 fields without really understanding  that you did it. A form with 13 fields on it to start is usually  intimidating and might scare people away, but if you collect a little  b

it of information at a time, you are more likely to get people to fill  out the form. This site is actually making use of a which is a nice way to capture information if you don’t have the  resources to build a database to store information in. However, the form  they wound up with is very long and very ugly. This form has around 55  fields, 50 of which are required. Now, in a situation like this, you often times do need to collect a  lot of information, but the better approach would be to break it up over  several pages (which is possible in Google Forms). That way, you at  least feel like you are making progress. Having visitors to your sites  complete a larger number of smaller tasks is generally a better idea  than forcing them to complete one giant task. The other issues with this form is that it is not taking advantage of all the new form fields HTML5 allows for: These field elements all add a bit of improvement over the basic text field that is being used instead, as noted on the provided in this week’s discussion overview.