Code for submitting a simple contact form to my email

[graphicgal]

I am a semi-luddite in regard to code, however I have managed to successfully build a site in html (yes, I was told no one does that anymore). I have a contact page that asks for Name, Address, and Comment. I don't know how to get it to send the information to me. I worry that my email will be exposed to spammers and don't know enough about how to prevent that. I have been doing research, but my eyes begin to cross when reading coding instructions on sites, and I just don't understand it. Can someone either point me in the direction of clear instructions for newbies, or actually give me the code that I can put in my document? I used DW's form feature to make the three text boxes. In fact, I'll add the code below if that would be helpful. Thank you so much in advance for your help.

Catherine

<label for="name"><strong>Name:</strong></label>
<input name="name" type="text" id="name" size="80">
</p>
<p>
<label for="email" style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 24px;">Email:</label>
<input name="email" type="email" id="email" size="80" maxlength="80">
</p>
<p>
<label for="comments">Comments or Questions:<br>
</label>
<textarea name="comments" cols="90" rows=15 wrap id="comments"></textarea>
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Submit">
<input type="reset" name="reset" id="reset" value="Reset">

(My website is live: http://www.catherinecampaigne.com/contact.html)

[Ben M]

You will need something to process your form.  Many hosts offer these to free and you would simply just replace the form action with that processor.  There are also form solutions out there you may want to consider depending on your needs. If you are looking at just gathering clients names to store in a CRM, you could integrate a Hubspot form and that could act as your form and CRM for you. I would not recommend using their free emailing tool though, many tend to get banned as the regulations on that part are very extreme.

A few comments from your site initially looking at it.  All the text is contained within an image. Because of this you site will most likely be ignored by search engines as there is not readable text on the page. In addition that font is difficult to read as there is not a lot of contrast between the font colors and the background.  

[graphicgal]

Thanks!

[BenPleysier]

In answer to your other post which asks if you can use Alt-Web Design & Publishing: Responsive Contact Form with Bootstrap 3.2 and PHP (Part 1), the answer is yes with the proviso that styling is ignored. The tutorial was written for a previous version of Bootstrap.

[Nancy OShea]

 And I am moving your duplicate post out of view as it only confuses people. 

Ask your hosting provider if your plan supports PHP and the PHP mail () function. If it doesn't, you'll need to find another solution like this mail sending library on GitHub which supports SMTP authentication and a lot more.

https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

Creating secure contact forms and processing scripts are no trivial matter.  What you don't know can hurt you and your site.  When in doubt, don't risk it.  Use a 3rd party form service like Wufoo.com or Jotform.

https://www.wufoo.com/

https://www.jotform.com/

[Nancy OShea]

https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

Creating secure contact forms and processing scripts are no trivial matter.  What you don't know can hurt you and your site.  When in doubt, don't risk it.  Use a 3rd party form service like Wufoo.com or Jotform.

https://www.wufoo.com/

https://www.jotform.com/

[graphicgal]

Thanks Nancy. Even some of the answers are confusing. I'll check out wufoo and jotform.

Catherine

[Nancy OShea]

No offense intended but if you think OUR answers are confusing, just wait until you're faced with a serious problem you can't get out of.  If you don't know how to code and you don't understand the terminology, what will you do then?

Incidentally, there's a lot more to building good websites than pretty pictures. 

1. Your server is not secure.  That's a problem.  Most people won't share information over a non-secure HTTP server, nor should they.   Ask your hosting provider about SSL/TLS certficates.  Even free ones from Let's Encrypt are better than nothing.

2. Your site contains no REAL TEXT that search engines, language translators and screen readers can see. Images of text are a usability nightmare.

3. The code is a shambles.  Did Photoshop generate this for you?  That's OK for a quick prototype to show the client but it won't work for production.  Here's why, you've got almost 100 code errors on just one page.

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.catherinecampaigne.com%2Fshamanism-whatis.html

4. Your site is built with fixed-width tables.  It's not responsive.  Google penalizes sites that aren't mobile & tablet-friendly.  Sites must perform well for all users, no matter which devices they have.  You can't do that efficiently with tables.

I could go on but I think you get the picture.  Contact forms are the least of your worries. You have much more work ahead.  Start learning HTML and CSS.

• https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
• https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

[osgood_]

OP - (l have managed to build a website in html (yes, l was told no one does that anymore)

Just to clarify, the best developers still build website using traditional workflows, the poor ones, mainly those who have entered the game in the last decade or so depend on frameworks and libraries. Thats ok until something goes wrong, as it will, at which point they wont have a clue how to resolve the issue. Beyond following instructions like programmed robots they are virtually devoid of any real skills relating to web development. The pay grade is quite poor as well given there is an ocean of poor web developers which drives down the amount of financial return that they can command.

[Nancy OShea]

"The pay grade is quite poor as well..."

That all depends on where you live and who you work for. 

According to ZipRecruiter.com, the average annual salary for a web developer is:

United States: $75K. 

Los Angeles: $79K

Chicago: $83K

New York: $89K.

According to Glassdoor.com, the average salary

Google: $118K

LinkedIn: $129K. 

Brigham Young University, Utah: $14/hour.  

Location, location, location.

[osgood_]

Big City players always pay more as the cost of living is deemed to be more, one also has to factor in hours of travelling on a crowded train if you dont live in the City which costs £1000's per year, so I expect to see above average wages in those locations.

Outside of 'town' the pay package drops substnatially to between 22k-35k a year for your average developer, the likes of you and me and probably the majority, hardly big money these days.You probably wouldnt be able to get a mortgage based on that salary after tax, travel, living costs etc.

Have you looked at any job adverts recently and observed what skills they require for 65k-75k grade pay, a bloody genius.

Humm its widlly inaccurate - Utah University $14 dollars an hour!!. You'd have to work all night and all day, plus some to make even 35k a year, let alone glassdoors.com drunken guess at the average salaries.

£11/hour in UK money x 12 hours a day that makes me £132.00 x 7 days = £952.00 a week, assuming I dont keel over and die of exhaustion and that still only comes to 48k per year.

Is Utah a dirt cheap place to live??

Just doing a bit more research indeed.co.uk suggest the average UK web-developer salary is £33,178 per year

https://www.indeed.co.uk/salaries/web-developer-Salaries 

But I guess its all relevant in terms of the cost of living in each location. The cost of a pint of beer is about £3.70 here. In New York it appears to be about £7.00 so you would probably need an 89k salary just to have a good night out!

[Nancy OShea]

"Is Utah a dirt cheap place to live?"

Cheap is a relative term.

In my home state of California, the min wage is $12.00/hour which while much better than some states is still way short of what's required to live here.  This year, the poverty level in California is 49K for an individual, 67.6K for a couple and 103K for a family of four.  The average home price is: 578K.

In contrast to pricey California, the US min wage is the same as Utah's: $7.25/hour which unless you live in a cave & travel by foot is not a living wage. The poverty level in Utah is 12.5K for a single person and 25.75K for a family of four.  The average home price is 320K. 

So a poor college student in Utah working part-time would rather what -- deliver pizzas for 7.25/hour or work in the college IT dept as a web developer for 14/hour?  From the college student's perspective, 14/hour must seem pretty good.

[osgood_]

Seems to me that the $14 an hour in UTAH uni would be for a relatively experienced web-developer given the poverty level salaries quoted. Do most UTAH inhabitants live in a cardboard box or something similar because who can afford to buy a house at 320k if the wages are that low? I think UTAH must be similar to the UK where few can actually get onto the property ladder and the wages are of a similar structure, unless you work in one of the big Cities like London, Manchester and commute 30+ miles to a cheaper area.

[pziecina]

As everyone knows, I do not often join in discussions anymore, (Dw is dead as far as what I will now write).

Sorry to disappoint you Os, but £125,000.00 is not unusual in web development, especially for managment roles. However, (and this is a big HOWEVER) you are probably thinking that web development as how it used to be back before creating 'full scale applications' was possible, (and yes, $14 per hr is about right for traditional web sites).

The real money, as I have said before. Is now in what was once the domain of stock-management, distribution, sales, poduct support and on-line training, (sometimes including all those, in one package). Done using dedicated programs such as access, powerpoint, etc. or even custon written in C++, or Java. That is no longer the case.

Now it is 99%, done using web techs. and to make matters worse, they are all behind 'closed' secure gateways, (so no examples, sorry). If you want an idea of what web developers are doing now, (for that amount of money being talked about) think about companies such as Amazon, and everything they require to operate and run their buisness, from the customer placing the order, (front-end, and cheapest part to create) to everything requiered on the back-end, such as stock control, 'picking' the item(s), deliver to customer, accounting, etc, etc, and you will have an idea, why those high salaries are possible in web development now, as they are now all done using web techs.

Traditional web sites, especially static ones, simply do not 'fit' into what web development entails now, and if someone wants to earn a good living now, everything that one must know goes well beyond e-commerce as it used to be.

[osgood_]

I agree Paula but to earn that kind of money you have to be exeptionally talented i.e. a tradional web-developer who understands what they are using and has developed/acquired those skills over time, uses their own initiative rather than is dependent upon off-the-shelf packages. They might use react or vue or a number of other frameworks BUT if you have ever used any of those you also know you arent going to get very far unless you have a deep knowledge of vanilla javacscript. Similarly one might also use Bootstrap but  you will definitely need an indepth knowledge of html and css to push the boundaries when Bootstrap simply does not offer what is required. One would like an experienced operator not to be dependent on any framework/library and write 100% vanilla solutions but I dont know how realistic that is these days.

My point was IF you have the experience and skill then you WILL get a top paying job but I cant help thinking these positions and developers are very much in the minority and most are average developers earning an average wage, which if you believe what indeed.co.uk suggests is the average wage in the UK isnt that great. This is reflective of what are essentially robots mostly deploying off-the-shelf frameworks and libaries working on reasonably poor paying client websites/applications, a far cry from blue chip companies like Amazon you are talking about, which you would expect to pay mega bucks for the best in the business.

Most companies in the UK dont have deep pockets so they generally get what they can afford which means they are vulnerable to being dumped upon by developers who cut corners so to speak to maximise their profits, especially if those developers work for a company, rather than as independent freelancers.

[pziecina]

I fully agree Os. The point is though, is that those types of salaries are possible. The main drawback for many thinking they can, (or should) get those salaries, is frameworks, and 'point and click' environments, as once you move beyond the 'front-end', which I have already said, "is the cheapest part to produce" (static or dynamic). Many are 'lost' as to what is required.

Dw and other similar programs, are I think responsible to some degree for the problem of under-earning, (or should that be, under-achiving) for many, who look at what is possible, but only see 'quick and easy' solutions offered, and even worse they then start to think those solutions are the norm.

Some people are surprised when they see Dw, (etc) listed as UI creation programs, but if one thinks about it, that is all they are good for in the modern arena of web development. As for not many earning very good salaries, I would disagree, as one simply has to think of the number of buisnesses who supply device specific apps, (which all use web techs, as even C++, C#, etc are now possible to use as part of web dev).

[osgood_]

Yes, sure those types of salaries are achievable, but just knowing Bootstrap or jQuery, using Wix, Webflow etc isnt going to get you anywhere near to achieving that kind of renumeration - 22K - 33k maybe is possible. If you know some vanilla javascript, can write and  style you own components in html, have some server-side programming knowledge that'll probably elevate you up another level 33k - 45k, which is probably a decent salary in the UK for most if you get near the top end of that wage span. Beyond that you need to have some extra special knowledge and brain power to achieve 50k - 70k+

Most companies in the UK are small independent concerns which account for the majority of development work, be it a simple front facing website or websites which encompasses some more complex but managable back-end work which most average developers should be capable of producing but I truely believe the ones which you are taking about are in the minority and would require an exceptionaly skilled team to produce.