Response Forms

Forms provide a neat way to allow website visitors to repond. Better than the standard Email form in that you can guide the users to provide you with meaningful information. Normally more people respond using a form than a straight Email.

For a sales request, particularly where you would like money sent with order, some people are worried about quoting a credit card number. So I recommend a belt and braces approach, to allow applications by telephone, post, fax and personal visit, and in any other way you can think of. They can print a copy of the response form and attach their cheque.

There are two ways of handling forms. Method="POST" Action="mailto: etc is unreliable in that early versions of Internet Explorer did not handle it, and it also requires that the visitor has his mail handler set up correctly. So I am not going to tell you about that one. However, you can try it Here

The second involves a CGI script placed usually in an area of your webspace called something like cgi_bin/ or in some cases in a common area provided by the ISP. Ask them! The script if you have to install it yourself could be called FormMail.pl and obtained free from http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/scripts.shtml Each of the these scripts has different rules so follow the instructions on the readme file.

Form Template

Once the form script is in the CGI area of your hosting space, the permissions have to be set to allow use by visitors. CuteFTP has a way that these can be changed by highlighting the script and going into Commands | Advanced. I am told that the codes should be set as rwxr-xr-x or 755. If this does not work for you, have a chat with your friendly ISP helpdesk.

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