Web Design Discussion

In Part 1 (points 1-8) I discussed How to Install Master Form v4

Part 2

How to Configure Master Form v4 and its Associated Files

9. Create a web form

The form can be placed on any domain you choose. Here’s an example of the html code in a quote form for Unit Coins

<.form method="POST" action="http://www.isitebuild.com/cgi-bin/MasterFormV4.cgi".>
<.input type="hidden" name="subject" value="QUOTE REQUEST for UNIT COINS".>
<.input type="hidden" name="requiredfields" value="realname,email".>
<.input type="hidden" name="emailfields" value="email".>
<.input type="hidden" name="emailtemplate" value="/unitcoinsemailtemplate/feedback_email.txt".>
<.input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="http://www.unitcoins.us/thankyou.shtml".>

Note: remove periods for the above code to work.

Explanation

First line - this is the URL of where the master form located on your server (where it’s processed)

Second line - the subject of your form (what will appear in the subject line of the confirmation emails)

Third line - these are the fields that visitors are required to fill in. If not they will receive an error message and won’t be able to submit the form.

Fourth line - shows that the email fields are hidden. This prevents spammers from accessing your email.

Fifth line - this is the location of the email template you need to create for the form results to be sent to your email. Place this file on the same server as your Master Form Files.

Sixth line - this is location of your thankyou page, where you send visitors after they submit the form.

The other lines of your form will include the form fields and submit button. Make sure you do this correctly otherwise your form will not work.

10. Create an email template

To get the form results sent to your email inbox, Master Form V4 reads an email template file. Therefore you need to create this template, upload it to the same server that contains your Master Form files, then create a place holder in your form for it to work ie <.input type="hidden" name="emailtemplate" value="/unitcoinsemailtemplate/feedback_email.txt".> (remove periods before tags)

Once generated, the email is sent.

An email template file is a plain text file containing the entire email, including the email headers.Master Form V4 is told where to find the email template file by a hidden field in the form named emailtemplate. If you don’t want the form submission to generate an email, just omit the hidden field.

Using the email template, you can format the emails the way you want to receive them (or have them sent), with the data you want to see arranged in the way you want it. Make sure the fields are identical to the ones you have in your web form.

Here’s an example of the contents of an email template for a simple feedback form:

From: [[email]]
To: webmaster@example.com
Subject: Someone used the simple feedback form!

This was submitted:

Name: [[name]]
Email: [[email]]
Comment:
[[comment]]

11. Create a thank you page

This is the page that is sent to your visitors after they have submitted the web form. It confirms they have filled it out correctly.
You can also use this page to send special offers or promotions ie a free ebook, report or download. Create a placeholder for it in your web form.

Example
<.input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="http://www.unitcoins.us/thankyou.shtml".>
(remove periods before tags)

12. Create an error page (optional)

Master Form v4 can generate an error page when it encounters an error during form submission. A generic error page is displayed if you don’t specify a custom error page.

Place the line below in your error page template (this could be a simple html page)

[[ERROR_MESSAGE]]

Create a hidden field to tell Master Form V4 where to find it.

Example

<.input type="hidden" name="errorpage" value="http://example.com/busyfeedback_oops.html".> (remove periods before tags)

When your visitor incorrectly fills out the web form, he will automatically receive this custom error page. You can write anything you want on this page this inform your visitor what happened.

13. Upload all files to your server

Master Form files are uploaded to the domain where the form is processed ie <.form method="POST" action="http://www.isitebuild.com/cgi-bin/MasterFormV4.cgi".> (remove periods before tags)
This includes your email template ie unitcoinsemailtemplate/feedback_email.txt

The web form, thankyou and error pages are uploaded to the domain where you want the form located.

14. Test your web form

Fill out all the fields of your web form and submit it. You should immediately receive the thankyou page (or error page if you made a mistake) and receive the form results in your email inbox.

Conclusion

Master Form v4 is the most secure form I’ve found on the Net. It will also allow you to create database files for your records and create multi page forms. Purchase your copy of Master Form v4 NOW and say goodbye to form mail spam.

Master Form v4 is the best form on the Net to use for security because it has anti-hijacking code built-in plus auto-submission protection against spammers. It also allows you to:

Block IP addresses by people that misuse your form
Ban words and phrases that are inappropriate or are commonly used to spam forms.
Define the maximum data size to limit the amount of information submitted.

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Do you get a lot of spam from the subscription or contact forms on your web site? This is becoming a serious problem for a lot of site owners but I have found a way to stop it completely.

Example of form mail spam

A client of mine has an e-commerce site that takes orders through a contact form. He began receiving multiple orders per day. At first he was excited because he thought he was getting lots of orders. Then he discovered they were all false emails. Obviously

s more secure than Jack’s form mail. It also allows you to hide your email address in the script and not place it in the form of your web site. It also did not stop form mail spam because anyone can submit it with a false email address.

Solution - Master Form v4

Benefits

• Anti-hijacking code built in.
• Notifies you of hijacking attempts.
• Allows you to create multiple forms for any number of web sites.
• Ready made templates that can easily be placed on your site
• Easy to customize to suit your needs i.e. create as many fields as needed
• Block IP Addresses that are sending spam
• Block auto submissions - stops robots from automatically submitting forms with false emails

Resources

Master Form Overview
How-to Articles on Master Form

Stop form mail spam now and get a copy of Master Form v4

How to Analyze Your Web Site Using Google’s Webmaster Tools

Are you keeping track of how many visitors your web site is receiving and where they are coming from? If not, try using the free webmaster tools from Google.

Benefits of Google Website Traffic Analysis Tool

1. Home page crawl

Google provides the exact date Googlebot (Google’s search engine) last successfully accessed your home page.

2. Crawl Stats

“These statistics provide distribution information for pages we have crawled for our google.com index. The PageRank distribution reflects all crawled pages in your site, not just the home page”.

3. Page analysis

These statistics show you how the Googlebot sees your site. Google provides a table of all the external links to your site and what keyword phrases are used. If you click on a word or phrase in the external links a table shows the variations of the keyword phrase being used.

The table displayed for my web site showed 200 external links with their accompanying keyword phrases. Google does not show all the external links to your web site.

4. Web crawl errors

These pages list URLs from your site that Googlebot had trouble crawling. Here are the errors that are checked:

HTTP errors
Not found
URLs not followed
URLs restricted by robots.txt
URLs timed out
Unreachable URLs

5. Index status

Provides statistics of pages from your site that are included in Google’s index.

Here’s a sample of the pages indexed by Google of my site:

Operator - Description - Result
site - Indexed pages in your site - site:www.isitebuild.com
link - Pages that link to your site’s front page - link:www.isitebuild.com
cache - The current cache of your site - cache:www.isitebuild.com
info - Information we have about your site - info:www.isitebuild.com
related - Pages that are similar to your site - related:www.isitebuild.com

Conclusion

Using a website traffic analysis tool will help you to pinpoint errors in your site’s design, find what sites are linking to yours, and how Google is indexing your web pages. Correcting these website errors will ultimately improve your site’s performance by boosting your web traffic.

As a professional web designer I often receive documents from clients that I can’t open. Recently I received a .docx file from a client who was using a new computer with MS Office 2007 installed. I have MS Word 2002 installed on my own computer so I was unable to open the Office 2007 document.

The .docx format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word or with alternative operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X. It is also not compatible with other word processing applications like OpenOffice, Lotus 123, or NeoOffice.

How to convert .docx files to a readable format

Docx-converter.com converts a Microsoft Office .docx file into a simple html file. It strips out some of the formatting, but now supports bold, italic, and underlined text. Left, right, center, and justified alignment. Unicode characters, tables etc.

Other methods of converting .docx files

Rename the .docx file (after downloading) and change the extension from DOCX to ZIP. The icon associated with the file changes. Windows will now see it as a ZIP archive instead of a Word document. You can open the contents with WinZip, WinRAR, PKZIP, or any other ZIP compression tool.

The actual content of the document is contained in the document.xml file. You can change the contents of the file by editing the XML file directly with notepad, drop it back into the ZIP container, then change its extension from ZIP to DOCX. Now you have made the change to your docx file.

Resources

Exploring the XML File Formats

DOCX CONVERTER

An iFrame is a great way to syndicate content (text or images) on another site. It embeds a window within the host web page whose height and width can be adjusted by the iFrame code. When embedding the iFrame it displays a border around it.

Article - How to Create an iFrame

Creating an iFrame without showing the border

Here’s a web page displaying multiple flash slide shows using several iFrames

1. The Problem

When using the same flash files and html code for each slide show on the same web page the slide shows did not work. When image.xml (one of the flash files) was renamed to image2.xml to display the next slide show, it did not appear on the page.

2. The Solution

a) To display several Flash Slide Shows on the same web page I needed to create an iFrame for each slide show. I placed all flash files for each slide show in a separate folder, named them accordingly then uploaded them to the server ie

slidehow1
slidehow2
slidehow3
slidehow4

b) I created an iFrame for each slide show with different images for each one and wrapped it in a css box. I used a css box (instead of tables) so I can easily remove the border plus add padding between each slide show.

CSS

iframe {
border: 0px solid #ffffff;
}
.central-1 {
margin-left: 140px;
position: relative;
width: 400px;
border:0px;
background-color:#fff;
}
.central {
margin-left: 140px;
position: relative;
width: 400px;
border:0px;
background-color:#fff;
padding-top:240px;
}

c) Explanation

The CSS border code above removes the border.
The first CSS box (.central-1) has no top padding because it is the first slide show that appears under the text.
The second CSS box (.central) contains padding to create space between each slide show.

XHTML


<div class="central-1"><iframe class="border" src="http://compass.ihost-websites.com/slideshow1/" width="320" height="320"
frameborder=”0? scrolling=”no” align =”left” name=”myInlineFrame”></iframe></div>


d) Benefits of creating several iFrames on the same webpage

- helps the page to load faster than if the flash code for each slide show was inserted in the web page

- easy to add more sildes to each slide show if needed

- slide shows display the same as if the flash code was actually inserted in the web page.

Yahoo! recently announced a way you can specify what sections on your page you want crawled by their search engine spider. If you have parts of your web page that are unrelated to the main content (ie navigation, footer, etc) you can insert the “robots-nocontent” tag.

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To read my other posts about the robots.txt file, please visit:

What is robots.txt file?

How do you create a robots.txt file?

If you incorrectly format your robots.txt file, your web site files may not get indexed by the search engines.

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Please read What is a robots.txt file?

How to Create and Use a robots.txt file

1. Open notepad and save a file named robots.txt

2. Create records

The content of a robots.txt file consists of so-called “records”. A record contains the information for a special search engine. Each record consists of two fields: the user agent line and one or more disallow lines.

User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or File Name]

Here’s an example:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This robots.txt file would allow the “googlebot”, to retrieve every page from your site except for files from the “cgi-bin” directory. All files in the “cgi-bin” directory will be ignored by the googlebot.

3. Upload the robots.txt file to your server.

Make sure you upload the robots.txt file to the root directory (same location as your home page).

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Sometimes you may not want the search engines to spider specific directories of your site because you don’t want the informationto be read by the public. You can accomplish this by creating a robots.txt file and placing those files in it.

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