The Power Of CGI Forms (Part 3)

This is the third in a series of "How-to-do-it" articles for the beginner or pro online. It outlines the resources for making CGI Forms.

In our previous article we discussed the power of using CGI forms and the importance of them to your site for many of your daily tasks.

Forms have a variety of potential uses. Among them are:

-- Sales
--Subscriptions
--Requests for information
--Surveys
--Questionnaires
--and many other potential uses

This article details some resources for developing your own CGI forms for your site.

Creating your own forms can be both fun and intimidating. There are several steps to creating a form and getting it to function correctly.

The basic construction of an html form is this...

FORM begin a form
INPUT ask for information in several ways
INPUT ...there can be as many input areas as you want.
/FORM end a form

Of course, there is a lot more to creating forms than that simple bit of HTML.

Here are some great resources for learning how to do forms:

http://www.webcom.com/html/tutor/forms/start.shtml
http://mastercgi.com/howtoinfo/formtutorial.shtml
http://www.webmastercourse.com/articles/html-forms/part1/
http://html.surfnet.nl/designer/intertut/formtut1.html
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/forms.html
http://activewebmarketing.com/tools/cgi_installation/index.html


Also, here is an online generator to aid in the work:

http://www.webschematics.com/html/formmaker.html

Some find the task to be just too time-consuming and demanding. Others have a webhost which does not allow CGI forms.

A simple, quick way to use forms without all of the work of creating and uploading them to your site is to use a remotely-hosted script you will find for free at this site:

http://www.response-o-matic.com/

Here are many more remotely hosted resources at this site:

http://www.cgi-resources.com/Remotely_Hosted/

Whichever path you take, be sure to recognize the importance of using forms in your online work.

They are worth the effort to set up and use for gathering all kinds of information in a
fairly secure way.

Larry Johnson,

About the author.

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