Web Site Design
By
HORN and WHISTLE
Website Forms
This is a
demonstration of a contact form, sometimes known as an E-mail form. Here,
you ask your customer to fill out certain information. When the customer clicks
on the "Submit" button, the form converts the information to an
E-mail and sends it to a mailbox of your choice. If you were asking for credit
card information, the form and the mailbox would have SSL encryption added.
This form below, however, is just a demonstration
of how forms work. Notice that it generates an auto response, which the client
sees almost immediately after clicking the button. Here, we also show you
right below the auto response and what the form's resulting e-mail looks like.
In an actual form on a website, that E-mail would be sent to the web site
owner's mailbox of choice.
Forms are a very neat way to get your site visitors
to contact you, and you can also make sure, by using form validation, that
your customer doesn't leave out anything important. As such, forms of this
type are much better than simply asking your website visitor to send you an
E-mail.
Here's the sample form. The asterisks mean that
the information is required. You should get an error message if you do
not type something into each field on the form. However, you do not have
to complete the message area if you don't want to. This is a very simple
example of form validation where you must include certain information.
After all, if you were asking a client to ask a question, you could not
send him an E-mail answer for his question if he left out his E-mail address.
Go ahead, type in your name and E-mail address. You'll see the results
almost immediately of how forms like this one work.
