International Forms Formatting

What is the best way to set them up?

[pageoneresults]

Okay, I currently have a slight issue with a project that I'm working on. I have a form that collects data from users who are submitting their domains to be included in a database.

Part of that form of course has address fields. I know this has probably been addressed before but I'd like to start a fresh topic. What is the best way to appease both USA and International visitors who would be filling out this form? Should it be like this...

Company Name: 25 Characters
Contact Name: 20
Contact Title: 15
Address 1: 25
Address 2: 20
Address 3: 20
City or Town: 15
State or Province: 10
Zip or Postal Code: 10
Country: 15
Telephone: 15
Fax: 15

The confusion we are having has to do with the City or Town since not all countries use that type of nomenclature. Same goes for the State or Province. Is there a universal way to set a form up where anyone from anywhere would understand what they need to enter in the fields? And, do I need that Address 3 line?

<edit 1> Per Woz' comment about the Country, I forgot to add that.
<edit 2> Added the character width of the text box.

(edited by: pageoneresults at 12:58 am (utc) on April 11, 2002)

[olwen]

I get annoyed when I am required to enter a postal code/zip code because I never use it normally, although they exist in New Zeland.

I like to enter a street address, suburb, town.

[Woz]

Um, you're missing Country.

Couple of things,

leave the fields free of formatting, I find it annoying when I cannot enter my state because the webmaster has only allowed for two characters as in the US states. Similarly country concentric formatting for phone numbers can present problems.

And avoid dropdowns if possible. A dropdown for the Country is OK, as long as you have them all, but otherwise they have little value as they make assumption which are often not applicable.

Onya
Woz

[Purple Martin]

My "state or province" is the Australian Capital Territory. I have a friend who's "state or province" is Worcestershire. These are both longer than 10 chars long (although there are commonly used abbreviations available). I know that you're trying to avoid a bloated database size, but you should consider that place names can be very long.

Also consider that people's names can be long, such as this popular Greek name: Georgiou Papachristodoulou.

[pageoneresults]

I'm sorry, I should have been more concise on the character issue. I am not limiting the number of characters that can be entered. What I've specified above is the actual width of the input field. I made that mistake years ago and it only needs to happen once!

[DrDoc]

An alternative to those three address fields is to have a textarea box instead ..

[pageoneresults]

Hi there DrDoc, just called my programmer and he said that method won't work. We are mapping the address fields to a searchable database and the address lines need to be separate.

I was hoping to receive a litte more feedback on this knowing that we have all these worldly visitors here. Anyone else care to add to this before I make a decision that will come back to haunt me?