Setting up Forms

Adding forms to your site will allow artists to apply for a residency or workshop directly through your website. Below are instructions for adding an online form and if this proves difficult a printable form has also been included. In order to use the online form you will need some understanding of how forms are designed and processed.

Online Forms

The following form will allow an applicant to enter all their information you need and send images to you by email. You will need to be familiar with the following form elements in Fig 01 - 04.

Fig 01 Name field

Fig 02 The Submit and Reset buttons

Fig 03 The red line that indicates the boundaries of a form

Sections of forms are called 'Fields'. There are visible fields, such as the 'Name' field and there are hidden fields which you can only see in when looking at the code view. The hidden fields will contain information such as the email address to return the form to and which page to send the visitor to after they submit the form.

To use this form you will need to save this page to your computer and then open and edit it in Dreamweaver.
1. Click your cursor on this page
2. Go to File > Save As
3. Find your Arts Host or Website folder which should be on your desktop
4. Call the page form.htm
5. Open Dreamweaver
6. Go to File > Open
7. Go to your Arts Host or Website folder which should be on your desktop
8. Find the folder called 'form_files', open it and then double click to open the index.htm file
9. With the index.htm file open, delete the information that you do not need, leave the red line (Fig 04) and the information contained inside it. This is the form and everything contained within these red lines are the fields

You can then start modifying the form to suit your own purpose.

To change the visible fields
10. Select the field you want to change, in Properties Inspector box (Fig 04), change or rename the field or change the amount of lines or characteristics of that field

Fig 04 Properties Inspector when the name field is selected

In Fig 04, the name field has been selected. The field is called 'name' in the TextField. It is a 'Single line' field, meaning you can only enter one line of information, which in this case has been set to 20 Characters wide. If you typed 'Please Enter Your Name Here' in the 'Init Val' box, it would appear in the Field and the visitor could type over it. When you select the address line, you will see that the Properties Inspector box will show that its name is 'address' and that it is a 'Multiple line' field. In this way you can change the properties of the existing fields.

To add an additional field
11. Open your Objects Inspector (Window > Objects) and select 'Forms'. If you hover your mouse over any of these buttons it will tell you what they are

Fig 05 Select 'Forms' in the Objects Inspector	Fig 06 Form objects in the Objects Inspector

Changing the way the form is processed
The form is processed through a number of 'hidden fields'. In the code view a hidden field will look like:

input type="hidden" name="email" value="you@yourwebsite.org"

Here, input type instructs that this line of code is hidden, its name is email and the value is an email address to which the form will be sent.

12. Change the email address that the form to your email address
13. The most important line you need to customise is the form action code, this is the line that tells the computer what to do with the information submitted in the form. At the moment it looks like this:

<form action="http://www.yourwebsite.org/cgi-bin/form/formmail.pl" method="post" name="mailing">

If you are hosting your site with Arts Host, the address that you need to process your form is:

http://www.artshost.org/cgi-bin/form/formmail.pl

Otherwise, you will need to email your service provider with the following question:

'I would like to set up a form on my website to process mailing list applications, please could you give the address that I need to process this form'.

14. You will now set up a 'Thank You' page, that lets the visitor know that they have joined the mailing list. You will see in the example above, by looking at the code, the following line of code:

<input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="http://www.yourwebsite.org/thanks.htm">

Your visitor will be 'redirected' to a page called thanks.htm.

You will need to create a page called thanks.htm and save it in the same folder as your form.

15. With Dreamweaver open, go to File New
16. Save the page in your 'Website' folder, naming it thanks.htm
17. Type on the form. For instance, "Thank you for submitting your name to our Mailing List"
18. Add a link to go back to the main site or the page that the visitor came from
19. Save the page
20. Open the page that contains the mailing list form
21. Go to the code view
22. Find the line of the code that says 'redirect' (as above)
23. Change the http address to your address, and type in the location of your thanks.htm page, including http://
24. Change the line of code that sends the form to be processes

Copying The Form Directly From The Code

Example Of A Form For Applying For A Workshop To Be Printed And Posted

To use this form you will need to save this page to your computer and then open and edit it in Dreamweaver (see instructions of how to save page).
25. The form consists of a table, text and horizontal lines and can be edited much like a Word document
27. You will need to ask applicants to print the form and post it, so firstly make sure that the page is viewed in a window that contains the standard buttons at the top (ie if you are using a pop up window it should include the menu bar or tool bar), secondly that the page has no unnecessary images and thirdly that the form is the right width to print on A4 paper
28. Try a test print

ADDING FEEDBACK TO YOUR SITE AND CREATING DIALOGUE

There are 3 ways that you can add user comments to your website.

The simplest way of adding feedback to your site, would be to add an email link to feedback@yoursite.com and ask people to send you comments about the site. It would then be up to you to collect this information together and publish it in a page on your site. Obviously there would be some work involved in the publishing of these ideas.

A more automatic way of doing this is to use a Guestbook script, which would usually be done using the cgi or perl programming languages. This method works by providing a form on your site which the visitor can fill in. The results are automatically published at the top of a specified page, which lists all previous comments. This method involves some more complex knowledge of websites, but there are pre-programmed scripts and instructions available. A good one can be found at Matt's Script Archive. www.scriptarchive.com

The third method is even more sophisticated and involves setting up a whole interactive message board system for your site. A message board provides interactive forums, plus a control panel for you to administer the comments and layout. Users can register with a user name and post questions, answer other people questions, leave comments and much more. This is a program which uses uses cgi scripting. This can be downloaded as a package and uploaded to your site using the supplied instructions. A very good, free message board is available from www.ikonboard.com. Their site also has a more detailed description of the features offered by a message board.

HELP AND RECOMMENDATIONS

If you experience any difficulties with this process or find any of the instructions unclear, please do not hesitate to email.