Articles Index >> Marketing 2

"The Power Of CGI Forms" (Part 3)

by Larry Johnson


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...

begin a form
ask for information in several ways
...there can be as many input areas as you want.
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 utor/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 utors/forms.html
http://activewebmarketing.com ools/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, author

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About the Author

Larry is a webmaster and editor with six years
experience. His background includes counseling, retail sales, radio and t-v copy writing and production. He is currently active in his imprinted promotional items business and weekly publication of the free business newsletter, Biz Site Biz E-zine. He has been nationally published in Home Business Magazine. He may be reached at: mailto:webmaster@bizsitebiz.hypermart.net or you
may view his site at http://www.BizSiteBiz.com/