Required fields indicated by asterisk instead?

[Letterdance]

My customer would like to have the required fields for check out indicated, when they initially display, with an asterisk next to the required field name.

Then if does not enter a required field, when he clicks "next" the fields that need to be filled in should become highlighted with a different color (in addition to the text message at the top of the page).

He says that it looks strange to have the required fields in red when the customer hasn't even entered anything yet. I tried a pale yellow (which is used in their color scheme and looked great in the text boxes), but since the text of the name of a required field is also in the "required fields" color, I couldn't read the words in pale yellow.

Therefore, I chose red because I thought the red color most clearly indicated that this was a required field. I mean, what does purple text mean on a webpage? Usually a visited link. Blue means a link. Red usually means a required field.

But I agree with him that it is not ideal. Any way to change this? I have Dreamweaver, but haven't yet gotten around to doing much with changing templates yet because I am just trying to get the store up and running right now. We'll make it prettier once people can place orders.

[Kermy]

I can't think of any easy solution to this, because of the way the validation works. Actinic checks the input and if errors are found, displays them at the top of the page before inserting the Order template again. In other words, there's no way for the Order template to know which color it should be displaying at any particular time.

I simply ended up keeping all my prompts the same colour, making the asterisk more prominent, and relying on the error box to alert the user to their mistakes.

The only way i can see this working is to call a javascript function when the error box error box is displayed which can change the colour of the prompts. It would probably involve finding out which prompts had been entered incorrectly, then searching for them inside the text of the page and changing the colour appropriately.

Hopefully someone else can come up with a simpler solution? If not, and you're desperate to make this work, then let me know and I'll look into it further.