Adding an E-mail Form to Your
FrontPage^® Website

Contributed by Jay Schroyer

The original thought behind FrontPage when Microsoft Corporation bought this program in 1996 from a small software company was to provide Windows® users with a program that would allow them to quickly and easily construct a personalized website without having to learn complex HTML code. The program could be bundled along with other Microsoft® products during installation and offer users a way to express themselves online just as easily as they would create a document in Word or Publisher.

One of the ways that FrontPage makes website creation so easy is to provide users with automated templates that create the required HTML code for the desired command, but show it to the user as an animated device making the website creation process more of a visual experience than an endless string of cryptic code. These templates allow users to insert all kinds of information into their sites whether it be text, graphics, animations, videos, and even forms.

Forms are basically a set of boxes that allow users to enter their information and communicate with the site designer. If you’ve ever visited a website and clicked on an icon that allows you to request more information, chances are good you’ve filled out a form or a window that contains entry fields for information like your name, e-mail, etc. These forms hold your information until you hit the send or submit button at which time your data goes to the server that is hosting the website. This information will then be forwarded to a recipient that is specified in the forms properties.

Adding a form to your website has multiple benefits. It allows users to request more information or communicate with you concerning website content or layout. It also provides you with direct feedback as to who is visiting your site. It can also provide you with leads if you have an e-commerce site. Learning how to insert an e-mail form into Microsoft FrontPage is an easy task.

Creating the Form
You can start creating the form by opening up the page that you would like to edit. Find a place on the page where you would like the e-mail form to be. It seems that most pages put them in a sidebar or at the bottom of the information that you’re providing.

Position the cursor in that location and click so that FrontPage knows where you want to insert an e-mail form. From the menu select “Insert,” then “Form,” and finally “One-Line Text Box.” Your form will appear complete with a “Submit” and “Reset” button. The size of the form will be indicated by a dotted line. All actions must be performed within this dotted line for them to take affect on the form.

Formatting the Form
Now that we have our form in place, we can begin to format it more to our liking. If you would like the “Submit” and “Reset” buttons on separate lines, you can separate them with a hard return.

You can also name your fields by clicking next to them and typing in what you would like the field to be titled, for example name, e-mail, phone number, etc. To add more fields, simply follow the instructions from above by selecting “Insert,” “Form,” and “One-Line Text Box.”

By right-clicking on any of the boxes, you can pull up the “Text Box Properties” menu and make any changes that you wish including the name that you have given to the field.

If you’d like to add a place for users to submit comments, you can follow the same method, but this time under “Insert” and “Form,” choose “Scrolling Text Box” so that users have a little more room to comment.

Right-clicking again on the form will allow you to access the “Form Properties” which will allow you to add your e-mail address in the “Send to” field so that when a user submits a comment or request, it goes directly to your e-mail account.

You can also preset the format of your form e-mails to keep your communications consistent by accessing the “Form Properties” menu and choosing “Options” then “E-mail Results.” A drop down menu will provide you with choices of e-mail formats.

It’s important to note that FrontPage requires a set of plug-ins known as server extensions that need to be installed not only on your machine, but on the hosting server as well. If these extensions are not installed, the e-mail form will not work. If you’re having difficulty, contact your host and see if this is the case.

Extras All of that probably seemed like a rather simple Microsoft FrontPage lesson, but there are a few extra things that you can add to your e-mail form to make them more useful. If you don’t have a specific e-mail account for receiving e-mail from your website, you can set your form to automatically insert a subject line so that you can quickly differentiate these e-mails from the others in your inbox. Just go into the “Form Properties” and select “Options,” “E-mail Results,” and then “Subject Line.” From here, you can set a default subject line to quickly identify e-mails from this form.

If you have a business partner and would like them to receive e-mails from this form as well you can “trick” FrontPage into sending e-mail to more than one e-mail recipient. Currently, FrontPage will not let you put in more than one address as a recipient, but what you can do is create multiple forms with different recipient e-mail addresses.

You can then set each form to “confirm” with the next one creating a chain of referrals that the end user never sees. The user will only be asked to confirm once and then the e-mail will be sent to each separate address on each separate form. You can also learn a lot more about who is sending you e-mails from your form by adjusting the “Saved Fields” settings under “Options” in the “Form Properties” menu. By changing the settings, the e-mail form can provide you with additional information that may not be available on the submitted e-mail like date, time, the web browser used by the sender, user ID, and even the computers name that transmitted the e-mail.

Knowledge is power and the more you can learn about your customers or website visitors the more empowered you will be.

That’s all there is to placing e-mail forms onto your website using FrontPage. This article doesn’t even cover half of the options that are available under the “Options” and “Advanced” buttons in the “Form Properties” window, but it’s worth your while to take a moment and check out what FrontPage has to offer. You can always create a phantom page that you can use just for this type of testing and experimenting with all of the features that are packed into FrontPage as you learn how to make the Internet work for you.

About the Author:
Jay Schroyer has worked in the client and customer service end of business for over five years in retail, advertising, and printing. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English writing and communication.

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