Setting up a form

Learn how to set up an online form

Setting up a form is essential if you want to have your own newsletter or collect information from your website visitors.

Basically to set up a form on your site you need two things...

the form HTML code on your web page
a form handler to your website

Basically what the form does is send the information a user inputs, to a form handler (which is a piece of code or script) in one of the directories on your web server (your web host). One of the simplest and best form handlers is Formmail. You can get this at Matt's Script Archive (see below) and follow instructions on how to upload the form to your cgi-bin. Most web hosts will provide you with a cgi-bin. If not it is time to change your web host.

However you will also need a piece of HTML code to go on your webpages to communicate with the form handler. You can use the HTML code in the textbox below for this and change the details to make it work with your form. It should be obvious what you have to change when you look a bit closer.

FORM HTML CODE

This sample form which works with formmail is for our autoresponder information but you can easily modify it for your own site.

And the result looks like this:

It should be obvious you need to change the url in the "action=..." to point to your own form script (see below) and also the value of the "recipient" email address, the "subject", and the "redirect" url.

Form handler scripts

CGI Forms

If you simply want to set up a form you can get a good script from a Matt's Script Archive and search for "formmail".

PHP Forms

For PHP forms have a look at the script from Novice Form. This is easy to set up and works well. Form Processor Provided by Novice Form

SETTING UP A NEWSLETTER

You can find out how to set up a form to collect email addresses for an opt-in newsletter here.