is there anybody out there?

 

If you're selling goods or services on the net, or simply providing information for a school or community group, you need to ensure that people can contact you.

There are two main ways of doing this. The first, and simplest is to provide a link to your email address that can be clicked on, opening the browsers email package with your address automatically inserted into the email. There are several problems with this approach - one is that the address can be harvested by spammers (unless protected by an anti-spam script). and the other is that you won't necessarily be able to systematically gather information from the person(s) sending the mail. This becomes a big problem when you're getting tens or hundreds or even thousands of emails a day

The other, better, way of enabling people to get in touch, is to use a form. Forms can help organise responses, which can then be imported into a database, broken down statistically, and analysed. Forms can help keep records of contact details, passwords, purchase information, enquiry statistics and trends and so on

 

Look in the box on the right to see an example of a typical Form