Oregon State University
Oregon State University Home Page

Up

Building Feedback Forms

Introduction: One of the most popular ways to make a WWW site interactive is to use a form that can be used to gather information from those who visit the WWW site. WWW forms have much applicability in the business world, as forms may be used to collect customer orders, create a discussion list, build a sign-up list, fill out a reservation schedule, and so on.

Please do not take the term "feedback" form too literally. A good "feedback" form will not ask ask people to comment on the website itself. Before you begin to create your "feedback" form, you need to think through what kind of interaction your website should provide. Feedback forms can let people sign up for a contest, place a reservation, order a product, or add comments to a blog. A good feedback form will have questions that relate to the specifics of the underlying business or organization. Thus, it would be a really bad sign if the questions in the feedback form for your Final Website project would work equally well for a pizza parlor, fraternity, or badminton club.

To help you get started building a form, you might want to download and begin editing this sample feedback form. Please know that the purpose of this sample form is not to provide a good example for you to use. Instead, its purpose is to provide a quick way for you to import a working form into your website. You will need to substantially revise its content (along the lines suggested in the prior paragraph) if you want your website to earn an "A".

Building Forms with Nvu

  • Video 1: Building a basic feedback form. (10 minutes)
  • Video 2: Adjusting existing questions in a feedback form. (10 minutes)
  • Video 3: Adding check boxes to a feedback form. (12 minutes)
  • Video 4: Adding a drop-down list to a feedback form. (6 minutes)

Using FormMail to Send Email Messages

You can create WWW forms on your College of Business account, but due to security reasons the college's web server will not process the forms. Nonetheless, you can modify a form so it will send you feedback through an email message. To accomplish this trick, you need to redirect the output of the form to a computer across campus.

Instructions: Getting a feedback form to send you an email message involves changing the HTML form action command. Since the process is detailed and prone to errors, I built a file containing the necessary HTML code at this feedback.txt link. This somewhat out-of-date FrontPage Forms video shows the general procedures to use.

The video explains the following steps necessary to make FormMail send email messages:

  • You need to open the feedback.txt file.
  • Change "bozo" to be your UserID. Thus, the recipient should be changed from "bozo@bus.oregonstate.edu" to something like "stuj123@bus.oregonstate.edu".
  • Change the subject to be something better than "Coffee Roasting feedback form."
  • Open Nvu (or whatever website editor you prefer)and begin editing a page containing a feedback form.
  • Go into HTML view and search to find the <Form action ....> command.
  • Replace the <Form action ...> and any <Input ...> commands in the existing feedback form with the text from your feedback.txt file.
  • Save the feedback page, and test your work.

Currently FormMail is limited to send e-mail ONLY to OSU e-mail addresses. This includes all e-mail addresses of:

  •  @orst.edu
  •  @oregonstate.edu
  •  @osucascades.edu

If you want to learn more about using FormMail to send email messages, you might want to read the following general Oregon State University web pages:

This website was created and is maintained by Dave Sullivan.
[College of Business Home Page] [OSU Home Page] [OSU Disclaimer]