Forms and search on a website

Collect signups and messages with a Form block, read them in Halo, and let readers search your site.

Forms

Add a Form block to a page, write your questions and what readers see afterwards, and publish. A form only takes messages once it's published, so you can work on one without anyone sending anything. In a preview link, a form shows but sends nothing, and says so.

What readers send arrives under Responses within a minute or two. The sidebar counts what nobody has opened, and whoever last published the website gets a notification in Halo. They can choose to have that emailed to them too, under their account's notifications.

Who can read them. Responses are people's personal data, so they have their own permission. Someone can edit your pages without being able to read them. See roles and permissions.

Sending them to Halo CRM. For a form businesses use to ask to join, turn on Also send to Halo CRM's Inbox. It's there when your organization has Halo CRM. Each response still arrives here first, and then waits in the Inbox as a proposal, with a note on the response that links to it. Questions about a business's name, email, phone, website or address fill in what's proposed, so word them plainly.

If Halo CRM is off for your organization, a form set to send there keeps its responses here, marked as waiting, and they reach the Inbox once Halo CRM is back. If Halo CRM can't take one, it's marked Didn't reach the Inbox here, and whoever decides the Inbox gets a notification. Once the problem is fixed, open the response and press Send again: it goes to the Inbox as if it had just arrived, and the audit log records who sent it.

Using them in Halo Data. Under Halo Data on this page, choose a workspace and Connect. Halo Data gets a table of how many responses came in, from which form and page and when, refreshed every six hours, and you can chart it like anything else. Each response's day is your organization's, in its time zone. What people wrote stays out of it, because it's their personal data. Reading the table in Halo Data takes Read form responses, as reading them here does, and whoever can turn it on and off hears if it stops refreshing. The page shows the newest 500, and Download CSV gives the newest 100,000 with what they wrote.

Deleting one is for good, with no Trash to get it back from, because someone may have asked you to. The download and the deletion both appear in your audit log. A response that went to Halo CRM leaves its proposal in the Inbox, so if they asked for their details to go, delete that there too.

Halo stops most automated messages without showing readers a puzzle: there's a field only a bot would fill in, and a limit on how fast one address can send. If you start getting spam, tell Halo through Contact Halo.

Turn on Let readers search this website under Settings, and publish. Your navigation gets a Search link, and you can add a Search box block to any page.

It searches the words of your published pages and entries, in the order readers meet them, up to the first 20,000 characters of a page and 4,000 of an entry. It leaves out hidden blocks, what a form says only after it's sent, and anything set to stay out of search engines. Every word has to match, and a match in a title ranks higher. It doesn't correct spelling.

Results open on a page at /search. If you've made a page there yourself, they show in its Search box, and one is added at the end if it doesn't have one. A shared preview searches its own copy of the website.