Web Design

[acf]

Hi,

I am a novice in web designing, however, I am currently using FrontPage to design my website for the first time. I have gained some idea of the steps involved in designing the website and creating hyperlinks. Can anyone of you please advise me on the following?

1. How a Form can efficiently be created, included in the webpage and make it work? I intend to inset a Form for the customers to fill in with the requisite details and when they click 'Submit' they should be taken to Confirmation Page for 4-5 seconds and redirect to the main page of relevant services where they would click 'Buy Now' button for making payment through PayPal.

2. I have included few links in the website as well. Should I include the titles and descriptions of those links in key words?

3. Some basic idea as to how key words are included/uploaded to the website/server?

Any advice would highly be appreciated.

[kyber]

Hi acf,

I am not sure how Frontpage does it, but in html...

Everything for a form is enclosed between the form tags <form> and </form>

Here is an example: <FORM ACTION="http://www.hut.fi/cgi-bin/mailto?jkorpela@cs.tut.fi"
METHOD=POST>


<TEXTAREA ROWS=5 COLS=72 NAME=Comments></TEXTAREA></P>


<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE=Send></P>
</FORM>

ACTION - a form depends on a small program living on the computer where your form resides. This is normally provided as standard by your host isp. They will provide information somewhere on how to reference this program. The program is often called a CGI (common gateway interface) script.

The program processes the form converting the information to an email to you. (If you want to do something more complicated than this then you are into building/installing more complex scripts.)

I took this example from here (http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/HTML3.2/5.25.html). There are loads of guides to html on the net.

No doubt Frontpage makes it easy to construct these forms but you will still need to tell it where to find the CGI-script. One of the things it will ask is (or it may offer to create for you) is the page it should go to after the form is submitted.

I hope that gets you kicked off in the right direction.

Stuart

[epiphany]

search Google under form creator or something. You get free systems that spit out the html for you that you then need to cut and paste into your site. These ones will create a form that uses the customers own email to send the form data submitted. If you want to send it directly through the internet browser then you are going to have to use something like a cgi script. A lot of hosting companies offer these scripts free. If you have no idea what I am on about then get reading some tutorials.