Well done + suggestions on mandatory fields

[petercasier]

Andreas,

Very very very well done ! I looked all over for a free guestbook that showed quality, which would not clutter mandatory icons and flashy stuff all over my site.

Your website itself, the guestbook product (the layout, the simplicity, flexibility, the forum, the problem ticketing stuff, your speed of response,.. all shows a lot of quality and patience. Rather exceptional, really! Good karma coming your way!

If there is anything I could suggest, it would be:
- to indicate in the entry field of the guestbook which fields are mandatory... I saw several of your users mention which ones are mandatory in their guestbook header, making the header clutter a bit. (eventualy give the frames of the mandatory fields a red colour)
- or indicate which fields are optional of course
- if none of the above, then maybe consider making the 'name' field optional to fill in (people enter anything they want anyway)
- if you really want to pull it further, you could make it configurable by the guestbook owner which fields are to be optional and which mandatory...
- maybe the user definable field text (I had a long one), could be put in one line, pushing the entry field more to the right.. right now the fieldtext wraps (on the entry form), while there is still plenty of space to the right

oh and if you want to go really really fancy, you could add the possibility for a customizable poll or quality rating of the site also - as an optional entry field of course!


(PS: I don't mind the ads when people view the guestbook, and I know Adsense can be an absolute pain to control. - THEY need to do a better job. Wished they did as good a job in responsiveness to user requirements as you do ).