How to Setup Email Text Boxes Directly on Site?

Question

Can someone help me with terminology to search for how to setup a Web page where visitors can suscribe to a news letter by typing in their information into "live" text boxes, and click on Send so it emails to my contact mail address?
Once I know the terminology, I am sure it is a very basic question...
Golive 8.01

Answer 1

Hi:
What you are talking about is building a "form". What you have posted is a sample of a pre-built form and a service that offers free coding, or will go the next step for you and install a functioning form for you.
Golive has what you need to build forms on your own - it has all the text fields, radio buttons, submit buttons etc. available, and any book about whatever GoLive version you have (including the online HELP) will have step-by-step instructions on how to do the building on your end.
The tricky part comes with making the form actually work. GoLive can only build the form page with all the fields and buttons, etc. but processing a form requires a server, and coding has to be added to your page that directs the page to interact with the server and process the form.
Different servers (i.e. different hosting companies) handle forms differently. Some use cgi scripts, some use php scripts and occasionally other types. Some companies have prefab forms setup for you, similarly to what you posted from FreeContactForm, with good directions on how to make the scripts work with your forms. Others have prefab forms and poor directions or no directions on how to make the scripts work with your form. Other companies tell you you're on your own altogether.
I'm from the design side of the world and doing forms was quite intimidating for me originally. It doesn't intimidate me anymore but it's usually a minor pain in the a$$. Depends on the hosting company. Some have instructions that are clear and easy, etc. Others, not so much.
What I generally do is start by contacting the hosting company Tech Support and asking how they handle forms. They may direct me to their prefab stuff, often accessible through an ADMIN portal, or they'll tell me to go find my own script, or whatever. Depending on what they offer I'll take a look and if I have questions I'll call them back or not.
Basically with forms you have 2 key things to grasp. What coding do you need to add to your web page? And do you need to address any kind of separate document? Sometimes there will be a script page that resides on the server (in a cgi-bin, or php folder, or on the root) that you would need to open and add something to. In your web page itself you always have to add something to the form part of the coding, but sometimes you add something to your head code as well. It just depends on the script involved.
Generally you need to provide the email address that the form results will be sent to, a URL for a "Thank You For Subscribing" (or whatever) page that will appear after the person hits the "submit" button, or other page you want to appear (maybe you just have them go back to the homepage on the website, or you send them to a default "your form has been submitted" page that the script will generate if you don't provide a URL. Thats ez, but the pages are usually ugly and won't match your site at all.). Also, you usually have options to provide a Subject Line for the email that will be generated so that the receiver knows that the email is from the form, etc.
FreeContactForm appears to be offering to just handle all that for you and you can certainly go that route. When I first tackled forms I needed a programmer buddy to help understand what the heck was going on - you'll probably need someone to help you. But it IS good to learn to understand the basics because, if you build websites it's going to come up over and over. And it's good to learn to work in source code at least to some extent, because that will come up too.
But if you're building something for fun now and aren't going to do this a lot, you probably don't need to hassle with it.
Hope that helps and good luck!