Late last year it came to my attention that there was an issue with the Internet Explorer 9 beta version which was preventing some of the enquiry forms from being submitted by telling the user that they had failed to complete a required field when the form was validated. Unfortunately the scripts that validate the form are a number of years old now and won’t be getting updated so I am in the process of testing out the jquery validation scripts and so far so good, once I am happy that the test form works I will begin the process of upgrading the existing forms to work with the new scripts. In the mean time I would advise against using IE9 beta when trying to place an enquiry.
Update 6/1/2011:
I am now happy enough with the new form validation to start rolling it out, the first to get the upgrade is the Place an Order form which is used to convert an existing enquiry into an order. The only minor issue that I have to sort out is the title tags for each of the text boxes, which are showing “<b>” and “</b>” which is the piece of code that makes text bold, the problem is those title tags double up as the validation error message so they need those tags, no doubt I will find a solution at some point.
Update 8/1/2011:
I have now upgraded the General Enquiry form with the new jquery validation, the old form was split across three accordion panels, the new form is split across two tabbed panels instead, the first tab is the enquiry form that asks for your name, contact details, and your message to the design team, with the second tab containing the file upload facility. With the old form you were limited to uploading three files, since we have now moved to new web and emails hosts our maximum combined file attachment size has increased from 10MB to 25MB, so I have added two more file attachment fields bringing the total to five. The file upload facility is something I have decided to look into further, specifically making the process a bit more user friendly, currently the user doesn’t really know what is going on until they are redirect to the successful enquiry page, it’s not really an issue if the attachments are only small but once you get to a few MB’s it can feel like a long time during which not much seems to happen, hopefully I will be able to find away of bringing some sort of progress indicator into the system.
Update 9/1/2011:
I have now upgraded the Trussed Rafter Enquiry Form with the new jquery validation and the tabbed panel layout as seen on the other recently updated forms. The only thing I still have left to do on this form is reinstate the feet and inches to millimetres calculator that was found in the sidebar of the old form.
