FrontPage hosting cuts out learning a lot of code if you want to use forms to collect information on your customers, store it in a Microsoft Access data base, and then use it for things like email blasts later on. If you don’t have FrontPage and want to create databases, you are looking at learning and using PHP and MySQL to set up the same thing. If you don’t have time to do this, you are better off with FrontPage hosting forms rather than trying to accomplish this with the software and coding scripts you may get from a low cost web hosting company.
If you are really new to budget web hosting, forms are a ‘collection of controls’ that you have created in order so that visitors to your site can enter their personal information or even feedback. This information can be used later on for things like shipping merchandise or putting visitors on your mailing list. Forms are an easy way to collect information, because they work with most browsers – and without them, you would have to get into client side scripting or other advanced technology that you might not understand right away. The main form that you will have on any web site is the personal information form that is filled out by your customers, so creating forms for databases isn’t hard to do, especially when you have FrontPage.
There are two parts to any form, the client side, and the server side. The client side is simply the collection of text input boxes, drop-down lists, and check boxes that your customers fill out. When they are finished, this information is automatically sent where it needs to go. The server side is how the information get processed and stored on your server. This is where server side scripting like CGI or ASP would normally come into play, however, with FrontPage hosting, you can send the information your visitors give you to emails, store them in a Microsoft Access database, or send them to a file.
So let’s talk about how FrontPage hosting can help you on the client side first.
- The form wizard automatically helps you create four different forms: A Feedback form is a form page where users can type in personal information or comments.
- A guestbook is a form page where visitors can register comments that can be read by other visitors.
- A search page is helpful for larger sites so that a user can enter a keyword and find information on your site.
- A user registration page is a page where a user can type in a code and access restricted parts of your site, like the chapter of an eBook.
To create these forms:
- All you have to do is go to the file menu and choose ‘new’ to open the new task pane.
- Click ‘more page templates’
- And then open the Page Templates dialog box.
- All you have to do after that is follow the directions.
- The wizard will automatically add the controls you need in order to create a complete form.
If one of the four standard forms doesn’t work for your needs, the wizard can help you create something else. When you are finished, you can even use the wizard to add the form to a particular page.
Now let’s get to the server side of the equation. Specifically, we’ll talk about once you collect customer information, what you can do with it. When a visitor has filled out one of your forms, they will hit the ‘submit’ button. Without using CGI or ASP, you can have this information sent to your email, saved in a database, or saved in a file. All you have to do is click where you want this information sent to in the Form Properties box. It’s that simple. The only thing you have to make sure of, though, is that your hosting company has a Windows hosting environment or has FrontPage extensions or this feature won’t work.
The results of sending the information that you collect from customers to an email is self-explanatory. If you have a small web site, and visitors are just requesting more information by mail, for example, you can simply respond to their request for information without any further action. If you want to store the information in something like an excel spread sheet to create a mailing list, it is easy to send information to a file as well. Then you can use the information as you choose to later on. However, collected information can be a very valuable asset, and perhaps the best thing to do with it is to create a database.
A database is a special server-accessible component that can be accessed and updated quickly. This means that your customer information becomes interactive. For example, if you give a customer an ID number on the form, they can update or change their information in the database whenever they want to right from your site. This is extremely important for shipping items or keeping a current mailing list. The easiest database to use is Microsoft Access, although you can use MySQL or Oracle as well. In order to create a database quickly, FrontPage hosting offers you easy ways to create databases, database connections from your website, and web pages that can access them. In other words, FrontPage makes it easy for your website to talk to the database in order to store, retrieve, change, and sort information collected on your site. All you have to do is click on ‘Tools’ go to ‘Site Settings’ and go to ‘Databases.’ The wizard will walk you through the rest. As you can see, with FrontPage hosting, it’s easy to use forms and databases to collect and store information from your customers instead of using the PHP and MySQL provided by a cheap web hosting company.
