The first step is to determine what kind of information you need or want to gather, as this basically determines which controls to place on your form. Forms have a variety of uses, and this list may help you decide on what you need:

• Gathering contact information.
• Receiving requests.
• Collecting order, shipping, and billing information.
• Getting feedback.
• Setting up a guest book.
• Letting visitors search a Web site.
• Prompting visitors to log in to a Web site with a user name and password.

After determining what type of data to obtain, you can then design how that information can be collected through the use of form controls, and the way you want to lay out the fields.

You can organize the form into paragraphs or lists, or choose whether to use tables to lay out the form on the page, and whether to include a table of contents at the top of the page, which is useful for larger forms.