Hello Mahlon,
I have word that the public pages will be replacing the web forms. The documentation is being worked on for the topic of setting up a public page in Method:New. It is currently unavailable.t
Currently in Method:Classic, if a contact puts themselves in twice using a web form, they have a number append to the customer name like John Doe Inc.(2). Classic:New public pages work like regular pages, so it will give you an error if you try to save the record. You can modify the Save button to check if it is a duplicate record and either modify the name or give a warning message. I'm not sure if future development will have a built in checker for duplicates or not for public pages.
Greg