Ok – I am one who practices what I preach, sometimes. Meaning if I design a club website, I force myself to run through it and use it. Fill our the forms, touch all the knobs, and flip all the switches. Unfortunately, many don’t. Even myself on the rare ocassion.

Today I found out something simple. I forgot to pay attention to tab indexes of my forms. First, lets explain what a tab index is. It’s simply a linear progression of what happens when you hit tab. In a form, it should be the next field. On a web page, it should be the next link. However, if you create forms, and forget to set tab indexes, you will find the browser, or any other random force will decide the tab order.

So here I was filling out a club website membership form, and I hit tab. It jumped to the contact us form on the side. I scratched my head, and in my sleep deprived state, I continued trying to fill out the club website’s form only to get annoyed. Then it dawned on me, I forgot to set the tab index for both.

In our forms plugin, just log into your club website account, and either drop this line in the shortcode on the page/post your form appears ( .. tabindex=”1″ ..) or if it is a widget, click the Advanced options of the widget, and adjust it there. Set them to be differing numbers. Far from eachother. Example, 1 and 200 are good places to start. One and 2 will make them overlap, unless you only have single field forms (but the button counts as a field/index as well!)

If you are a club website not using clubhosting, you have to set it the old fashioned HTML or Javascript way.

You’re on your own.
Sorry 🙂