Week Eleven | Part One

Forms Basics

The basic process of communication requires three components:

• A message that needs to be delivered.
• A medium to convey that message.
• A recipient of the message.

Inherent to the third step (receiving the message) is feedback from the recipient. Radio and television utilize the Nielson rating system, direct marketeers use pre-printed response cards, and Webmasters use (among a variety of tools) forms.

Forms provide a number of important and useful functions. They allow your visitors to contact you without the need to use their email client (such as Outlook). Forms allow visitors to provide useful feedback about content on your site. Most importantly, forms allow visitors to become customers. Forms are the mechanisms that power e-commerce.

This lecture will NOT deal with the creation of forms to enable commerce, or with form validation techniques. This involves a significantly higher level of knowledge for client- and server-side programming. The goal of this lecture is to introduce the coding of forms and to raise your knowledge and skills just a little bit more.

Never underestimate the importance of staying connected to your site visitors. They will often provide valuable feedback that can help improve your site or the services it provides. Their advice may come in the form of criticism, but this is far better than no interaction at all.

You wouldn't leave your house without first checking your appearance in the mirror. Don't build your Web site without providing your visitors a way to provide feedback that may very well improve it.

Setting up a Form

Like everything in HTML, forms are built with tags. The tags are very specialized, but their structure follows all the rules you've learned. So, with this in mind, let's do a quick review of some form coding.

Here's the code that will get things started:

<form action="mailto:me@mywebsite.com" method="post"
enctype="text/plain" name="emailform" id="emailform">

I'm starting with the creation of an email form because this is the easiest, less complex type of form to create. This is not to say that the form elements are easy to created, but the processing required to deliver the form is very simple.

Please go to Week Eleven Part 2 ».