Web forms

A web form collects details from visitors to your website: their name, company, e-mail and what they are interested in. You build it from the fields ASTRO already has, so what a visitor types lands in the right place in ASTRO. There are no free-text fields of your own: every field is one of ASTRO's, or one of your company's custom fields on companies and contacts.

Open Administration > Company > Web forms. The list shows each form with its status (Draft, Published or Closed), its web address once published, and when it last changed. On a phone the forms show as cards.

Build a form

Select New form. The builder opens.
On the left, pick fields from Company, Contact, Interest, Custom fields and Hidden. Each field can be on the form once.
Change the order by dragging a field, or select its handle (⋮⋮) and press Alt+↑ or Alt+↓. The ↑ and ↓ buttons do the same.
Select Settings on a field to change its Label, Placeholder, Help text and Width, or to make it Required.
On the Form tab, give the form a Name (only you see it), a Title, an Introduction, the Button label and the Thank-you message. To send visitors to a page of your own after they submit, fill in After sending, go to (an https address).
Select Save.

Hidden fields

A hidden field is not shown to visitors; it sends the value you give it with every submission. Use one to tag where the visitor came from (Source or campaign), who the new company is Assigned to, or which Brand it belongs to. Those three are always hidden. Most other fields can be hidden too: tick Hidden in the field's settings and fill in Value it sends. A hidden field cannot be required.

Publish

Open the Publish tab. ASTRO lists anything that stops the form being published, in plain words, for example Add an e-mail or phone field so you can reach this person. A form needs a visible e-mail or phone field, and a company name or last name field. When nothing is listed, select Publish.

Visitors see the form as it was when you last published it. If you change it afterwards, the page header says changes not published yet until you select Publish changes. Changing the web address takes effect at once.

Close form stops a published form taking submissions; publish it again to reopen it. Duplicate on the list makes a draft copy; Delete removes the form and frees its web address.

The name a form is published under

Every form lives at name.astrocsm.ai/address. The name is your company's own, or a name you claim for one of your brands, so a brand's forms carry that brand's name. Under Publish under, pick the name.

To claim a name for a brand, select Claim a name for a brand.
Pick the Brand. ASTRO suggests a name from the brand's code; change it if you like (3 to 40 lower-case letters, digits and hyphens).
Select Check, then Claim name.

Names are shared by every company that uses ASTRO CSM, so a name that is taken, reserved or too close to another company's name shows That name is not available. Each brand can have one name.

The look of the form

Open the Theme tab to choose the font, the colours, the shape and the layout. See Web forms: font, colours and preview.

Share the hosted link

Every published form has a page of its own that ASTRO CSM hosts for you, so you can share the form without a website: in an e-mail, a social post, a QR code or a printed flyer. On the Publish tab, under Hosted link, select Copy link, or Open to see the page. The link works once the form is published.

The page shows your brand's logo at the top when the form is published under a brand's name, and your company's default brand otherwise. The page's title is the form's Title, and its description in search results is the Introduction.
If you rename a brand's name, the old link keeps working for 90 days and sends visitors to the new one.
Search engines do not list the page unless you tick Let search engines list the hosted page. This changes at once; you do not need to publish again.
If the Publish tab says hosted pages are not switched on yet, the form keeps its address and the link works as soon as they are.

Put the form on your own website

On the Publish tab, under Embed on your website, select Copy snippet and paste it into your page where the form should appear. The snippet is two lines: a placeholder and a small script. The form appears in a frame that grows and shrinks with the form, so there is no scroll bar inside it, and visitors never leave your site.

WordPress: edit the page, add a Custom HTML block where the form should go, paste the snippet and update the page. (In the classic editor, switch to the Text tab before pasting.)
Site builders that remove scripts (some plans of Wix, Squarespace and others): use Copy frame code instead, and paste it into the builder's HTML or embed element. The plain frame has a fixed height; change the height in the code if your form is longer or shorter.
You can put several forms on one page; each gets its own snippet.
For your own analytics, the page around the form receives an astro-form:submitted event when a visitor sends the form. Your web developer can listen for it on the placeholder.

Why the form does not use your website's fonts and colours. The form sits in a frame, and a frame never takes styles from the page around it. That keeps the form working on any website, but it means the look comes from the form's own Theme tab. Pick the standard font closest to your site's and set the colours with their codes; tick Transparent background to let your page show behind the form. See Web forms: font, colours and preview.

Statistics

Open the Statistics tab of a form to see the last 30 days: how many times the form was shown (Views), how many visitors began typing (Started), how many sent it (Sent), the Conversion (sent divided by views), how many were added to ASTRO and how many were spam. A chart shows each day, with a table of the numbers under Show data table. Top pages and Top campaigns show where the submissions came from (the campaign is the utm_campaign tag of the link the visitor followed). Views are counted without cookies and nobody is tracked.

Choose which websites may show the form

Under Websites that may show this form, list your own sites, one per line, starting with https://, for example https://www.example.com. Browsers then refuse to show the form on any other site, and anything sent from another site lands in Spam. While the list is empty, any website can show the form, and the Publish tab warns you. The list changes at once; you do not need to publish again. Remember to list every address your site uses, such as with and without www.