Creating An Email Form

By Author: Richard Lowe
Total Articles: 51
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Occasionally it is necessary to get some kind of information from your
visitors. One way to do this is to embed your email address, as a "mailto"
tag, directly on all of your web pages. This is not recommended for the
following reasons.

Embedded email addresses are vulnerable to spam spiders. These are special
programs which scan web pages looking for email addresses. These addresses
are then sent spam emails.

- You cannot format your questions.
- You cannot validate the answers to the questions
- You have no control over the visitor's experience of the data entry.

All right, if you do not embed email addresses into your web pages, how do
you get data from your visitors? It's simple - just create an email form.

Before you can begin you must obtain a forms processor. This can be done
using a service such as Bravenet or you can install one on your own server
(if this is allowed by your host provider). In these examples I will be
assuming you are using the Bravenet forms processor.

There are hundreds of different sites ...
... that will remotely host forms for you,
and if none of those will serve your needs you can set up CGI routines on
your own server (assuming your hosts supports them).

Once you have registered with your forms provider (in these examples I am
assuming you use Bravenet) you can begin creating your form. You will need
some information before you start:

- The name of the forms processing routine
- The names of any parameters which are needed by this routine

These items should be described in the documentation, FAQ or help files for
the forms system.

Now you need to include the appropriate HTML code on your page to create the
form. A simple form consists of two tags (there are other tags, but we will
not go into them in this article)

- begin the form
- get some data or define a value

The tag begins the form and defines the location and name of the
forms processor to use. The purpose of this forms processor is to take any
data that was entered by your visitor and format it into an email, then send
that email back to you. Some of the better forms systems allow you to
confirm the data with your visitor before it's sent and to even send a copy
of what was entered via email back to your visitor as a confirmation.

An example tag from Bravenet is shown below.



This tag says simply, "when the visitor presses the submit button, send all
of the data that was entered to the senddata.php file". The senddata.php
file contains special code which performs the necessary magic to send the
data to you.

Now you need to include some special "hidden" values to tell the forms
processor what to do. Hidden values do not cause any entry to be done - they
merely set up data to be used by the forms processing routine.




These two lines inform the Bravenet processor of the user number of the
form. This is created when you create a new form. Each form has it's own
unique number. Other forms processing systems may use similar identifiers,
or they may do something completely different.

It's important to understand this concept - these values are completely
defined by the forms processing routine. Different names and values will be
used by different forms systems.

Once you have set up the required and optional hidden values for your forms
processor, you need to define the form fields and input values. The three
lines below show how to do this.

What is your name?


Where are you from?


E-mail address?


These three lines ask your visitors for their name, location and email
address. As you can see, the prompts and formatting are included directly in
your form. The tags are used to define the fields that actually get
the data. The word "size" is used to indicate how many characters to
retrieve.

Now it's time to give your visitors a way to submit the form.




These two lines define the "submit" and "reset" buttons. The reset button is
optional, but the submit button is required (otherwise how would the data
actually get sent to the form?)

Now you need to end the form. This is done as shown below.



That's all there is to using a simple form to get data from your visitors.


About the Author Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This
website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet
profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
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