Ian Stewart
Jul 29 2005, 09:23 AM
I want to include an enquiry form into my web site, which forwards onto my email account.
how the blazes do I do this
PS it needs to be in simple terms please
tonyj
Jul 29 2005, 10:02 AM
will get the wife to email something to you Ian
Do you have cgi script on your website?
ian
Jul 29 2005, 10:04 AM
| QUOTE (Ian Stewart @ Jul 29 2005, 09:23 AM) |
I want to include an enquiry form into my web site, which forwards onto my email account.
how the blazes do I do this
PS it needs to be in simple terms please |
Not sure how simple this is gonna be ... sorry ... but I'll try to keep it easy.
There are two parts to the answer to this. The first is the actual form which appears on the web page. This is built just like any other part of your web page (looking at your webpage, I think you were using FrontPage, and I assume that there are ways of adding form elements to your page using this package).
The second part is the tricky bit. This is the script (or computer program) which takes the input from your form and e-mails it to you. There are various computer languages which can be used to write these scripts and which one you use depends on which computer languages are available on your web hosting service.
The first thing to check is whether your web hosting service already has a script you can use for this. Many web hosting companies provide things like this free for their clients. You'd need to check this with them - there should be details on their website.
Failing this, you need to find out which scripting languages are available to you. The most common ones for this sort of thing are ASP if you are hosted on a Windows platform and PHP if you are hosted on Linux.
Once you know this, you can then decide whether to write the script yourself or to pay someone else to do it or ... the easiest ... find a free script you can use. For example, go to Google and search for "php feedback form" and you get a variety of examples for how to do this in PHP.
One word of warning. If you don't know what you are doing, this type of form is potentially an invitation to spammers to misuse your site. I can't really explain this without getting really technical, and I'm happy to go into more detail if you like, but as a simple rule, the solution you choose should not contain your e-mail address on the form. Your e-mail address should be in the script on the server instead.
Ian Stewart
Jul 29 2005, 10:52 AM
my site initially designed in Front Page, but I'm now using dreamweaver.
I think the I'll be OK designing the form, it the next bit that I am not sure about.
My web hosting company do not offer any such CGI service, they suggested I do a google search, which I did do, but that just confused me more.
In short i need help with the second part
ian
Jul 29 2005, 11:49 AM
| QUOTE (Ian Stewart @ Jul 29 2005, 10:52 AM) |
my site initially designed in Front Page, but I'm now using dreamweaver.
I think the I'll be OK designing the form, it the next bit that I am not sure about.
My web hosting company do not offer any such CGI service, they suggested I do a google search, which I did do, but that just confused me more.
In short i need help with the second part |
Okay, it looks to me like you have hosting from me2uweb and also that you are using IIS 6.0 as your web server, so I'm assuming you have a Windows-based hosting package. Checking the me2uweb site, it doesn't look like their Windows hosting package supports PHP scripting. This will probably rule out tonyj's script, which I believe is a PHP script. That's assuming all my deductions were correct!
It does look like they support Perl and ASP. I don't really have any knowledge of ASP, but I'd imagine you can pick up a free ASP feedback script pretty easily.
For example, searching for asp feedback form in google.co.uk gives a number of results. The top one when I searched was codefixer.com and they look like they've got some code you can just cut and paste into a file.
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