How to Create a Form Website for Free
Adding a form to your website is a simple and professional way to get feedback from your visitors, whether it is an email address or a full feedback survey regarding your services. There are a variety of ways that you can add a free form to your website. Your choice will depend on your level of knowledge of HTML and how much time you want to spend creating and maintaining the form.
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Things You'll Need
- Web host and domain
- HTML editor
- Free form generation service (optional)
- Form script (optional)
Instructions
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1
Design your website. Decide on the page of your site where you want to put the form and open that file in your HTML editor program (such as Notepad or Dreamweaver).
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2
Check your web hosting service's list of features to see if a free form is included with the service. If so you can create and manage the form for your website from your hosting service dashboard. After you create a new form according to the instructions, the provider will generate HTML code for you to copy and paste into the body of your HTML document.
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3
Alternately, you can sign up for an account with a free form generation service, like Response-o-Matic.com or EmailMeForm.com. Just click the option to create a new form and enter your desired fields (such as name, email, phone number). The service will then provide you with HTML code to add to your website.
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4
Another option is to type your own form code into your HTML document from scratch (see Resources for an example of the basic HTML code for a simple form). Then open the free form script (PERL format with a .pl extension) that is available from Matt's Script Archive (scriptarchive.com/formmail.html) or a similar service. Edit the PERL file according to the directions under the "Setting Up the FormMail Script" section. You must then deposit this PERL script file into your "CGI-BIN" folder on your web server and then refer to it in the "action" attribute of the first line of your form code in the HTML file. For instance: <form action="/cgi-bin/mattscode.pl" method="get">.
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5
Upload the updated HTML file on your web server and test your form.
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Tips & Warnings
Only choose the third option (Step 4) if you are very familiar with HTML.
For free form generation services, like the ones mentioned in Step 3, you may have to display the service's web link on your web page in exchange for the free form. the link will be included in the code.
