Hi,

I questioned Gary about this on the Intermediate course, but apparently a little 'Christmas Cheer' has made me forget it...!

1) I need to create an email subscription form for my site - what I want is on the home page, alongside the rest of the details, to have 2 boxes for the visitors name and email address, and the details they enter to be put in an excel spreadsheet or table somewhere that is easy to use with my newsletter list. I know how to create these boxes, but how do I get it to send the information to a spreadsheet?

At some point I also need to create a search button to go on each page, but I will question that when I have sorted everything else.

2) On some of the pages I have created, some bugs keep appearing from when text has been entered from Word and Notepad, i.e. the text will all of a sudden change size for no reason. Can you tell me how to get rid of these bugs - I think Gary mentioned something about a 'Cleanup html' or something button?

Thanks in advance,

Jo.

Hi Joanna

With regard to your email subscription problem. I would suggest that you set up a simple database on your web server. This means that you will be able to input the details from these fields into this database. Once in the database you can access the data and use it to send out your emails. The way this works is that when the user enter their name and email address and click the submit button, the button will trigger some code that connect you to the database and inserts the details from the input boxes into the database.

The creation of a search is slightly more complex, you have a number of option with that which include:
Building Google into your site, so that you have a search box, that uses Google to search within the domain of your website.
You can just build in a simple find, which will locate the words on that page.
Depending on whether you work for a company with a programming team, you can get one of the programmers to write you a search engine that will search your site.

With regards to the HTML clean-up, this means that if you import html from word and notepad it may not be formatted properly. If you go to the Dream weaver menu and go to commands then HTML cleanup and then within the new window that opens select the options that you wish to use, then click OK. This should clean up your html code, so you should no longer get any errors such as you are experiencing currently.

Hope this helps

David

Hi David,

Im still having loads of problems with the coding bugs. If I do the cleanup thing on a page created from a nested template then it sometimes says it has cleared a few, but sometimes says its locked by a template, so i clear the template and the nested templates and update everything but it still isnt fixing it, or it fixes it then it creates another bug when all i'm trying to do is change the sizes. Its driving me INSANE!!!

The main problem as far as i can ascertain is the 'Style' box in the properties menu keeps setting styles without me asking it to and then defaulting everything back to something I dont want and havent set, and if i clear the styles from the templates it is not helping at all, and keeps changing the text size, style and formatting!

You can see why I'm getting a little irate now!

Hope you can help a bit...

Jo :(

This can be frustrating, and is usually caused by pasting something in from Word or other source, and Dreamweaver tries to keep the formatting the same, rather than pasting it as plain text and using the styles you have set up for your template.

It may be easier to start again (ie. redesign the template) and if you're pasting anything in from another program, paste it as plain text. To do this, first paste in Notepad, then copy and paste from notepad into Dreamweaver. If you're using Dreamweaver 8, there may be options to 'paste as plain text' or similar.

Other than that, can you suggest anything David?

Jo,

If you are finding it hard to set up a database to store customer mailing list information, http://www.bravenet.com may be able to help. They have a wide range of free services that are easy to set up and come with simple instructions for the beginner.

For mailing lists, see http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/elist/

Regards, Rich