Making Feedback Forms

This section of Iron Spider contains a series of tutorials which will show you all the ins and outs of making feedback forms. Forms like these are commonly used to allow your website viewers to contact you, make entries into guestbooks, post to mailing lists and more.

This section is split up into two parts. The first part will run you through the entire process of creating a simple feedback form that is fully functional and will email its contents to you when the user clicks on the Submit button. This includes the following:

• How to write up the HTML code to create a simple feedback form...
• How to install a special script that will process your feedback form...
• How to troubleshoot your feedback form setup...
• How to get setup information when technical support is unavailable...

The second part of this section is a rundown of all the various form components you can use in order to create a more advanced web form. This includes the following:

• Some fundamentals about all user input components...
• How to make single-line and multi-line text fields...
• How to make checkboxes and radio buttons...
• How to make dropdown menus...
• How to make buttons to activate your web form...
• How to layout your form using tables and some special form elements....

The following provides an introductory paragraph and a link to each page in this section:

A Simple Feedback Form

This page will show you the very basic HTML code required to create a simple feedback form that provides a box for the user's name, a box for their email address, a box for the comments they wish to share with you and a 'submit' button they click on to send you the information once they've finished filling in the form. Now mind you, this is just the code to create the user interface on your web page. You'll also have to install some kind of form mail program to process the form (covered on the next page)...

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Installing NMS FormMail

The submit button on your feedback form is not some kind of magical button that automatically gathers all the user's input and then guesses your email address and sends you all the information. To do all this, you'll need to install and configure a special script that runs on your web host's server. When the user clicks on the submit button, it 'calls' the script from your web server which then processes the user's input. The script I recommend is NMS FormMail. It's fairly easy to install and this page will show you how...

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Debugging Your Setup

When dealing with code that you have little experience with, for example, the Perl programming language that NMS FormMail is written in, it's easy to make mistakes when attempting to configure it to process your feedback form. This page will help you easily debug any problems you have with your NMS FormMail configuration...

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My Web Host is Out to Lunch

To install NMS FormMail, you'll need two critical pieces of information about your web server (the computer your web host has your website installed on):

1. The proper shebang line
2. The path to Sendmail

Once you have both these, you can just copy-and-paste them into the correct places in the NMS FormMail script which will facilitate getting it to work correctly. This page will show you how to get these pieces of information in the absence of technical support. (And by the way, if you're having problems with your web host's technical support, I highly recommend that you switch to Hostgator, my web host, which has excellent 24/7 hotline chat support)...

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User Input Components

This tutorial goes into some detail about what is going on behind-the-scenes of a typical feedback form. How does the script which processes the form know how to get the information that the user inputs? And how does it know how to organize that information so that when you receive the information at your email address, it makes sense when you read it? These questions and more are answered on this page...

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Text Fields

This page goes into greater detail about the various text boxes you can create for your feedback form including single and multi-line text boxes (also known as text fields) as well as password boxes which automatically hide the user's input as he types it in keeping it secure from over-the-shoulder snoops...

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Checkboxes & Radio Buttons

Here's how to create those fancy-schmancy checkboxes and radio buttons to use if you want to create a more complex contact form that has your users fill in a questionaire or survey. Simply asking for feedback may not be the ticket. Instead, it's sometimes better to prompt users by providing a list of multiple choices. The user easily makes selections by clicking on the appropriate checkboxes and radio buttons...

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Dropdown Menus

Another way to provide multiple choices in a web page form is to create dropdown menus. Dropdown menus are ideal when you want to avoid having a cluttered look in your form which might scare users away by bombarding them with too much information all at once...

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Push Buttons

Here's the whole nine yards on how to customize the submit button on your contact form or just create interactive push buttons on your web page for other reasons...

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Layout and Presentation

This page covers everything you need to know about how to layout out your web page form so that it looks easy to use, appealing and organized. Let's face it. We all hate to fill out forms. The better your form looks, the more people are likely to fill it out...

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