Determine how you want your form to appear

After you have defined the purpose of your form and its target audience, you will know what information you need to collect via your form. Hypertext forms provide a variety of elements (text-entry boxes, check boxes, buttons, and pull-down menu bars) that offer users various ways to respond.

To help you decide which elements are most appropriate for your purpose, you can review a discussion of these elements or study the following templates for different kinds of forms.

How to use the forms templates

You need three files to produce a properly developed form that uses the feedback.cgi script on web.ucar.edu. Two are HTML-tagged files and one is a text file.

The following groups of templates provide you with a starting point for each of these three files. You may preview the templates with your browser and select the ones that suit your purposes.

After downloading the templates you want (see "How to capture files" for instructions), you must modify the templates to make your form collect the information you need. The procedure for creating forms provides details for modifying these templates.

Choose one template from each of the following types

There are three examples, and each example has three templates. You can access them using the links below, or you can browse the directory in which they reside. All of the filenames for this tutorial begin with "form", and the examples are numbered "ex1", "ex2", and "ex3".

Templates for the form that will be displayed on the user's browser:
Note: The source files for these templates contain descriptive comments inside the HTML comment brackets .
Templates for the courtesy response to users who submit a form:
Note: The source files for these templates contain descriptive comments inside the HTML comment brackets .
The template that provides a format for the e-mail message generated by the form:

Return to Forms Introduction: Templates
Return to Forms Creation: Five steps