We rebuilt our own contact form this week

This week we rebuilt the contact form at byrender.com. The old version put every field on one page at once: business name, town, phone, email, business type, message. It is now a three-step form instead, business and town first, then how to reach you, then the details that shape your preview.

Step one is just your business name and town. Step two asks how to reach you: your name, an email, and a phone number with a country code picker rather than a fixed +44, since not everyone filling it in is dialling from the UK. Step three is where it gets more specific: what kind of business you run, and, if you already have a colour in mind, a palette to pick from so the preview we send back starts closer to what you would actually choose rather than a guess.

The other change is what happens if you leave halfway through. Close the tab on step two and come back tomorrow, and the form now offers to carry on where you left off rather than starting you over. It is a small thing, but forms that make people re-type what they have already given tend to lose them along the way, which is part of why the W3C's web accessibility guidelines include a rule against it: information already entered in a process should not have to be entered again. Ours keeps a draft across visits rather than only within one sitting, which goes further than that rule asks, but the complaint behind it is the same one.

None of this changes what happens after you send it. A real person still reads it the same day, a finished preview still usually lands within two working days, and you still pay nothing unless you decide to keep it, setup from £495 with hosting from £69 a month after that. If you have not been through the contact form yet, this is the version you will see now, three short steps rather than one long page. Everything else about how the studio works is on our guides page.