RE: Forms

Hi Matthew

just to check is this a new form you haev created and are testing or is it a fault you are trying to fix?

Also are you pasting the email addresses in or typing them, do they contain any punctuation remarks?

Regards

Jacob

RE: Forms

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for your question. I hope you enjoyed the Dreamweaver training back in December.

As one of the Dreamweaver trainers, I have been assigned your question, and I hope I can help you to resolve it!

Regarding the first part of your forum post, it's hard to advise without further information. Do you know if the form fields are being validated using Javascript (ie. before the form information is being sent to the server) or on the Server side once the form is submitted?

Can you provide a URL where I can check the form online?

In regards to your more recent post (22nd Dec), you say you 'receive the form'. How are you receiving the information? Is it by e-mail or stored in a database on your web site? You say Windows Explorer is unable to open the document: what type of document is it? Did you get it attached in an e-mail? What is the extension of the file?

I need to know how your form is set up, and whether the web site is live and online. What server-side technology are you using (Linux/PHP/MySQL; or Windows IIS, .NET, ASP)

NB/ It's unlikely a form will work properly if you are just experimenting on your PC with Dreamweaver.

I look forward to assisting you when you can provide the above details - thanks! If you have any difficulty providing these answers, please get back to me and I'll explain in more detail.

Regards, Rich

RE: Forms

Thanks Matthew,

That really helps to clarify the problem! Also, being able to see the live form means I can get straight to the problem.

Your form uses a 'mailto' as the action.

When looking at the source code for the form, it starts like this:

form action="mailto:info@instam" method="post"


This is a very out-dated way to provide a contact form on a web site. For one, your visitors will be required to have an e-mail account set up on their computer (eg. in Outlook or Outlook Express, or similar e-mail client software). For example, when I clicked the 'submit' button in firefox, the form did not submit, my computer opened a new e-mail window, with the data I had typed in to the form. This is not what a visitor would expect to happen when submitting a form!

Secondly, you open yourself to Spam, as any spam-bot can look at the form, see the e-mail address supplied, and add the address to it's list of e-mail addresses to send spam to.

Your web site appears to be 'static'. That is, it doesn't use any server-side technologies. All of your pages are HTML, plain text. This is fine for information pages, but when you want your visitors to interact with the site, whether it be posting a comment, submitting a form, or booking an event, you need to start using Server-Side technology that accepts the visitors information, and does something with it.

This involves programming scripts. Either you will need to learn how to do this (there are many free tutorials online if you search), hire someone to do it for you, or download a ready-made script, copy it to your server and adjust the settings to match that of your server. Alternatively, you can use free services such as http://www.bravenet.com which will do the work for you.

Easy e-mail form set up:
http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/emailfwd/

I'd recommend you start with them or another free service.

If you prefer to write your own script (or have someone do it for you), you'll need to decide which language script to use. Because you have IIS, the most common language is ASP (Active Server Pages). Find out more at http://www.asp.net

Within the ASP file (perhaps you call it process.asp), you would take the visitors fields they have filled out, do something with them (ie. e-mail it to yourself, or store it in a database if you have one on your web site) and then redirect the visitor to a 'thank you' page. You can do all this using ASP programming language. You would then set the 'action' parameter of your form to be 'process.asp' instead of the mailto command.

The other popular language is PHP, and this is usually run on Apache or other Linux server technology (you have Windows though).

You may also want to contact your hosting provider (where the web space is) and ask if they have scripts you can download for free. They may even be able to help you configure the script.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further queries. Good luck.

Regards, Rich