Put a New Spin on Your Form Creation: Reusable Form Elements

Zapof Forms reusable forms to reduce the spent on creating and editing forms.

Forms are a necessary tool for businesses and individuals to collect information, but they can be time-consuming and tedious to create. We discuss how form creators can use reusable form elements to reduce the time spent on creating and editing forms.

If you are looking to save time and create forms with little effort, you need to look no further than reusable form elements. There are plenty of ways to use this tool, the most popular being the reusable contact form. This is a great way to add a contact form to a web page that can be found on almost any website. With just one click, you have selected that contact form and it is automatically placed on your web page.

Introduction: What is a reusable form element?

As we all know, forms are the key to creating a great user experience for your website. But what about the tedious task of creating the same form elements we want to use more than once? Wouldn’t it be better if we create our forms so that the same header and input fields can be reused? Well, you can! Reusable form elements offer a way to solve this problem.

A reusable form element is a design pattern in which we use a group of fields in a form on multiple other forms. After you create the form, you can use it as many times as you want without having to recreate any of the text or input fields.

Benefits: Why use them?

Standardized fields

Standardizing fields on a form not only makes it easier to use, it also reduces errors and makes each form easier to maintain. If you have a set of fields that are used in many forms, why not reuse them?

Page consistency

Keeping your forms and pages consistent is key to a successful website. Once you have the homepage, your contact page and about page, what do you do when it’s time to create a new form or page? The answer is simple: reuse the common part of the pages such as header and footer.

Speed and efficiency

If you know that the fields for a type of form will be consistent, it makes sense to create a single form section that can be used repeatedly with minimal adjustments. That way, you only need to add additional fields and new content for a new form or web page. This cuts down on time spent at the computer when creating a new form or a web page, which translates into more productive hours and less frustration.

Reusable form elements examples:

Contact Form

The form should have a name, email, address, phone number, and message fields, as well as an optional “subscribe” checkbox.

Page Header

The header should have brand logo, links to product or service page, and optional sign up and sign in pages.

Page Footer

The footer should have columns for products and features, company pages and social media links. The footer should also have terms and copyright link at the bottom.

Invent without reinventing the wheel

How does Zapof Forms create reusable forms?

We looked at import tools. They have too many incompatibilities. We didn’t enjoy using the IFRAME because it is not secure. We are using the most familiar approach on the web, linking! But, instead of just a link that jumps—no, we certainly don’t want that—linking a reusable form means bringing all the elements into another form or web page with just a single click! It’s that easy.

We built the linking mechanism into our forms platform and you’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to link a reusable form into another form or web page. Click ‘Add question & element’, find the ‘Linked element’ card and click the ‘Choose’ button. Choose your existing form or web page and click the ‘Link’ button. Boom! Your reusable form or web page is now part of your new form or web page.

Imagine not having reusable form or web page such as footer and we need to update the footer of all forms or web pages. It is a nightmare that none of us would like to do. Lucky for us, Zapof elements linking saves the day! Update only the footer and all other forms or web pages that use linked footer shows the latest update.

Is Zapof linking technique only good for header and footer? Of course not, we can link contact form, feedback form or any reusable forms we can think of to our web pages. Not only that, we can even link a form and use the calculated value of a formula that uses answers in the linked form. For example, we can set a formula that uses the total amount of a linked order form to show surprise gift when the order exceeds certain amounts.

Zapof reusable forms in action

Let’s do this to demonstrate how easy and powerful our linked forms are.

First, we create a reusable uniform order form from this template.

https://zapof.com/form-template/7TT3a/reusable-uniform-order-form
We create a uniform order form for the primary school that shows a surprise gift of a school t-shirt when the amount is more than $100.
We also create a second uniform order form for the secondary school. The surprise gift is a scientific calculator when the order is more than $200.
To create the primary and secondary school uniform order forms, we only need to add the title of the school—primary or secondary, the linked uniform order form, and the text for the gift with corresponding formula—a t-shirt or a scientific calculator.