Forms

Forms are one of the most useful tools a web designer has. If you want to make your website more than an online magazine, you'll probably be using forms somewhere. Forms let you take information from your visitors and give them something back based on what they tell you. This is called 'interactivity'.

What you do with a form is totally up to you. It could be as simple as asking for a person's date of birth and then giving them their stars. Or you could ask for their favourite band and then give them a list of other bands they might like. To do something clever like the second example, you'd have to take the information your visitor gives you and run it through a computer program before giving them their recommendations.

Most forms are attached to a computer program running on the server, which actually does the work. The form just provides visitors with the right boxes and buttons to fill out the information. You'll learn more about programming elsewhere, but you don't need to be able to do any programming to use forms. There are lots of places on the web where you can download programs that other people have written.