Including a form on your Web site is the best way to get feedback from your visitors. You can have a form to gather your visitors’ email address so that they can subscribe to your ezine. Or you can have a form to collect visitors’ comments about your site. Also, forms allow your visitors to send you a request for a quote, or to send you all the necessary information when they want to buy your products or services.
In all these cases, you must design a confirmation page that will pop up after your visitors successfully fill up and submit a form. Unless you design a confirmation page, your visitors will be thrown into the generic confirmation page provided by your web host (usually an unsightly white screen displaying a convoluted plain text message written in a dated font type, that will most likely confuse your users and make them think that they have been thrown out of your site).
The confirmation page has several objectives:
It must clearly tell your users that the form was completed and sent successfully. For example, if the form is a subscription box for your newsletter or ezine, your confirmation page will say something like this: “Congratulations! You are now subscribed to our newsletter.”
It must give clear instructions of what your visitor has to do next. To use the same subscription box example, your confirmation page will also say something like this: “You will soon receive an email message asking you to follow a link to activate your subscription. Follow that link to start receiving your ezine immediately”.
It must provide your visitor with two or three navigation options so that he can continue browsing your site (don’t just let him go…). Two popular options are: “Return to our main page” and “Browse our archives” (although depending on the size and the architecture of your site you can offer other options as well).
One important consideration is that your confirmation page must have the same look and feel as the rest of your pages, so that your visitor will know that he is still in your site.
Once you create your confirmation page, you must insert the necessary HTML code to your form script, so that the browser will automatically display your confirmation page once the form has been successfully submitted. You do this by adding the following code after the <form> tag at the beginning our your form script:
<input type=”hidden” name=”success” value=”http://www.yoursite.com/confirm.html”>
Note: some cgi programs (form handling programs) use the word “redirect” instead of “success” in their programs. Check with your web host to see which one do they use.
What is the code method for including a link on a confirmation page that drives the visitor directly to their email account? For instance, if the confirmation page comes up and requires them to click a confirm link in their email, giving them a link to go directly to that account. I have seen this several times recently after signing up for various online services/newsletters/etc.
Thanks!
No simple answer for a coding method, Victoria. I depends on the code the site is using (PHP, ASP, .NET, etc) and the database behind the code. If you are looking for a some way to make this work on your site, I’d find a prebuilt solution that takes care of all the coding, login, signup, confirmation and database all ready to use. I’m sure that there are several solutions out there, you’ll just have to look around. You might look into using Joomla, Drupal or some other community based CMS that either has this feature built into it or has an extension available to make it easy for you to setup. Best of luck!