|
Creating Feedback Forms for Your Website, Using FrontPage
Many people criticize FrontPage and say it creates bad html code and is incapable of doing advanced stuff. Well, I'm a big fan of FrontPage myself, so I decided it's time for me to show all you html coders and Dreamweaver users just what FP can do. These instructions are for FP 2000/2002 and are not meant for the older versions of FP or for FrontPage Express (which is a totally different program). The screen shots and instructions come from FP 2002 but I've made many a form in 2000 and it's pretty much the same. The one minor drawback is that for the form components to work, your hosting server must include FrontPage extensions. Nowadays, most domain hosts DO include these, though they are not always installed by default, so you may have to request that they install them on your site. If you are going to use FrontPage to make your web pages and want to use it's convenient features, it's a good idea to first find a host that uses these extensions. Many of the free web hosting services now include FrontPage extensions also. For a complete list of these, check out this listing: http://accessfp.net/freefp.htm Let's say you want to add a feedback form to your website that people can fill in and submit to you via email.For this exercise, you can either just open a blank page in FP or you can add a new page to your existing FP Web. Once you have the blank page open, follow these step-by-step instructions: 1. Go to the Insert menu, then choose Form. Note the submenu that pops out. If you grab this by the top edge, you can drag it off and make a free floating toolbar so you don't need to keep returning to this menu every time you want to add a component to your form.
2. If you choose to drag the menu off, the toolbar will look like this and you can either move it to a convenient location on your screen or drag it up to the top of your screen and dock it there with your other toolbars. 3. Notice if you hover your mouse pointer over any button, a tooltip pops up to tell you what the button does. Click on the "Form" button on the left end of the toolbar and you will see this is inserted into your page:
4. Make sure your insertion point (flashing cursor) is blinking to the left of the "Submit" button and hit your Enter key on your keyboard a couple times to move the Submit and Reset buttons to the bottom of the form and give you room within the form to add some information and fields. I'm not going to explain how all of the form components work since this eZine is owned by Dian Chapman and there are tutorials all over her website which teach about Autoforms in Word and this part is basically NO DIFFERENT. Just use Dian's tutorials and insert some different types of form fields into your form. Simply type in your data and add textboxes, checkboxes, dropdown lists, radio buttons, etc., as needed. Also, format your background and fonts like you normally would any other FP page or just use the same theme or template that you use for your other pages. Feel free to add tables to your form to align things more consistently. Also, note that double clicking on any form components you insert into the form will bring you to the Properties box for that component, and this is again, very similar to what you see in Word, so go back to Dian's Autoform instructions if you don't understand this. Just be sure that everything you want included in the form is within the dotted lines you see on your screen once you have inserted the Form. Eventually your form should look something like this:
NOTE: Whenever you go into the properties of any component, you will see a Name box. This is where you must type what you want to see in the email that is sent to you when this form is submitted. For example, I named the group for the top three radio buttons "Gender" and I named the three individual radio buttons, "Male", "Female", and "Other" respectively. This is important so the email makes sense when you receive it. 5. Once the form is complete, RIGHT click somewhere inside the Form and select "Form Properties". Click on the button at the bottom that says "Options" and you will see the Saving Results dialog box where you can choose "File Results" to save to a file on your website or "Email Results" to receive an email which shows what people typed into the form. Click on the E-Mail Results tab and enter an email address, choose what type of format you would like for the email, and give the email a subject line. 6. You can also configure the confirmation page they will see once they "submit" the form. FP includes a default confirmation page or you can create another page in your web and select it in here by clicking on the Confirmation Page tab and browsing to it.
7. Click OK to get back to your form. If you do not have FP extensions installed on your hard drive, you will see the box below telling you that the email option won't work. I assure you the email option WILL work once you publish your form to a server that does have the extensions installed. Just be sure to click NO so FP doesn't remove your email address.
8. Now, simply publish your site to the web and go try out your form. If you've done everything correctly, it should look something like this and if you complete the form and submit it, you will see your Confirmation Page and soon receive an email that looks similar to this:
And that's all there is to it. I promise you, if you can handle forms in Word, forms in FrontPage are a walk in the park. |
|
.
