Okay, it’s me again…sorry. I am trying to help out a friend and do a website for him (I know it’s the bling leading the blind). I have his index page laid out fine, but I have never had to insert an order form link before.
It’s the usual, customer name, address, model number, price, etc… He is a knive maker.
I tried doing an html page only to find out that you cannot type data on it (suspect it has to be PDF?) Can anyone please offer a suggestion or clue on how to do this?
The links above just take you to my site for now…meant to say that…sorry. I am waiting for photos, prices, etc. which I should be able to handle. The ordering form is my quandry right now…
Hi Dick. You can place a form on a page easily enough. It’s <form> element, with various other inputs etc. But the tricky bit is getting anything to happen when the form is submitted. That requires programming … ugh!
Here is a site that creates form for you, which might be worth considering:
Building an ecommerce site is no small task. Given your level of knowledge you would be best off using either a provider, wordpress + plugins or something more robust like Magento (ecommerce cms). Either way your probably looking at spending over a hunred hours figuring it all out with your current level of knowledge. It is all much much more than just a form. The HTML for the form is the least significant part of it all. Also there are a lot of security implications that come into play with transactions. You can’t just simply have people send credit card information in an email. That would open your friend up to a whole world of hurt legally.
[FONT=Verdana]If all you need is a form that is going to be printed off and mailed, then you’re right - the easiest way to do that is with a PDF. Make your PDF form and insert a link to it in the usual way. e.g. <a href=“orderform.pdf”>Order Form</a>
If you don’t already have software that will generate a PDF, you can try [OpenOffice](http: //http://www.openoffice.org/), which is free. Simply create your form in OpenOffice Writer, and then use the “Export as PDF” option to convert to PDF. If you check the “Create PDF form” box, you will get a PDF which can be typed in by the customer; otherwise, they’ll need to print it off and fill it in the old-fashioned way.
Well you would need to create all the programming logic to process the form. That would be quit an undertaking for someone with no programming experience. Not to mention plagued with points of failure and security issues like just about everyones first experience programming.
[FONT=Verdana]Does that mean he wants folk to mail him the order form with a cheque? In that case, the PDF option is by far the easiest way.
(In my experience, trying to design an HTML page that will print in an acceptable manner on any printer, with any operating system, is a nightmare.)
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The point was, you could either use your computer to fill it in, then print and send (for those who have trouble writing or are blind or whatever, but fear web forms for whatever reason), or you could just print and fill in with a pen. So it’s fairly HTML-y. Firefox of course died a smelly death every time you asked it to print (GASP) fieldsets, but that’s why on the site we actually recommended people use a “better” browser like IE for printing
And yeah, for some reason we did have a lot of clients who wanted to either mail the form in or actually bring it to the office and drop it off after talking with our secretary.
Thanks, @Stomme_poes - that’s really interesting. I’ll look at it in more depth later, but it looks as if it might solve a few problems for me. Print preview seems to indicate FF16 will have no problems printing it, but I’m very low on ink just now, so I’ll not test it until my new supplies arrive.