Lesson 11. Creating Forms

You might sometimes need to collect information from the visitors to your Website. The types of information that might need to be gathered can include feedback about the site, user registration, responses to polls, and buying products (e-commerce). From gathering different types of information to creating an opportunity for visitors to interact with your site, forms provide the necessary user interface that enables you to obtain data. Forms allow you to ask visitors for specific information or to give them an opportunity to send feedback, questions, or requests to you. Visitor registrations and product orders often require the functionality of forms. Forms are often used in conjunction with databases and can enable visitors to perform searches and post information to be included in a database. A form contains fields in which users enter information. These fields can be text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, menus, or lists, to name a few.

Form data is usually sent to a database on a server, to an e-mail address, or to an application that will process it. The processing of forms can be done through dynamic pages (which use languages such as PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, and more to access

In this project, you will build a form with various text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, submit and reset buttons, and a menu.

dynamic content sources such as databases) or Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts. CGI is a standard protocol that acts as the communication link between the data from the form and the server. In this lesson, you will be creating the form that a visitor will see. Because you will not be working with dynamic pages or CGI scripts, you do not need access to a server to complete this lesson.

To see an example of the finished page for this lesson, open training.html from the Lesson_11_Forms/Completed/Training folder.