Web guy Phil Howie talked at Barcamp Auckland 4 recently about designing forms on the web. He singled out Luke Wroblewski as a good source of wisdom on this topic, especially Luke’s book Web Form Design. I can second that recommendation — I’ve posted about Luke’s form design ideas before.
My notes from the talk can be summarised in one sentence (with apologies to William Shakespeare):
Brevity is the soul of forms.
For more detail, you might as well just have a look at Luke W’s site or his book. I also recommend another book on the same topic: Caroline Jarrett & Gerry Gaffney’s Forms that Work.
This talk was worthwhile — especially for the discussion that followed — but I would also like to have gone to Vaughan Rowsell’s talk in another room, and not just because of the great title: “A healthy kiwi startup community (., !,or ?)”.