Question

I am not a web developer but I do have a lot of programming experience in C# and Windows forms programming. On our company webpage my boss wants me to put in a textbox where visitors can submit a comment and press a submit button and that comment will be sent to an email address. Right now, our website uses just plain old html, no php or javascript or anything like that. I am wondering what is the simplest way to accomplish what I need? Can someone point me in the right direction? The website is hosted on an Apache server so I won’t be able to use aspx.

Answer 1

The simplest method depends heavily on what is available. If PHP is supported, use it.

Here’s a simple example (I wouldn’t focus too much on their HTML — which is a bit shoddy) but the PHP at the bottom to give you an idea on how to pull the <form> in and send the email.

If you don’t have PHP and don’t want to install it, you can do this without any server-side code and outsource the problem. Bravenet (a name that will be familiar with any old-school webdeveloper) have a free hosted form solution that lets you post your forms to their server and they email you the result.

Not amazingly professional, but takes about 10 seconds to implement.