Happy Monday everyone! I got a couple of requests to cover some of the basics in Dreamweaver, and a couple of people specifically wrote in asking for some stuff about Forms. I figured – hey, now is as good a time as any to jump in and talk a little bit about the concept of the form. I’ve got a little background on the form and a tutorial for you to check out right after the jump. Make sure you stop on in.

Inspiration- Brad Moore
Brad Moore is Joe McNally’s Photographic Assistant, but to just limit him as the MacGyver of all things location and photography, is.. well.. limiting. Not only can he setup and move faster than a minx (though, I’ve never really -seen- a minx.. I’m sure he’s faster than it though.. ), He’s an incredibly accomplished photographer and a great friend. Many people get to see Brad’s work in private showings but he’s thrown down the blog gauntlet and started a photo blog. Definitely check him out at the link below. Welcome to the addiction.

Brad Moore – Photo Blog

Click on the jump for a link to the Forms tutorial, and our weekly contest!

A Little Bit of Form on the Form
Basically, the form is something that collects and passes information to a specific place for processing. When you make a form, you are creating a whole bunch of fields that contain ‘stuff’. That ‘stuff’ needs to have some sense made to it, and we do that in the form by creating what is known as a name-value pair in the form.

When you put a blank field on the page, that field needs to be unique, so we give it a name. Then, the person filling out the form puts in their information (stuff), which creates the ‘value’ for it. All of the text to the left of the field really is unnecessary to the form, but very relevant to the user because the user cannot see what those fields are supposed to collect on the page. When making a form, I tell people to keep your APE happy.

• Action: You’re going to need an ‘action’ link. No matter where you are getting your form processed, or what host you have, the host will always give you a link to where this form is going to be sent to. That’s your action link. You’re going to need to write that down to save yourself a lot of headache.
• Pairs: When you are creating the form fields, give them names that will be relevant to what the information you are putting in will hold. For example, when you are collection a persons last name, you’ll probably type before it “Please Enter Your Last Name”. It doesn’t make sense for you to make a text field and call it “Textfield5″. That will just confuse you later. Keep your field names in lower case, keep them relevant, and if you need to use a space, use the underscore. For that last name, the text field could be called “customer_last_name”. That will save the stress.
• Extras: If you are processing your form with a script (usually those scripts are a derivative of a popular script out there called FormMail) there are a series of name-value pairs that you can include as hidden text boxes to control the behavior of the form. For example, most forms use a hidden name-value that you can set called ‘subject’ which will let you type in the subject line of the mail that is sent to you, perfect for keeping track of forms in specific areas of a page. “Redirect” is also a popular hidden name-value which lets you have the user go to a specific page once the form is filled out.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at a tutorial by clicking here.

Contest Time
This week, I want to give away copies of 2 of our newest DVDs – Scott Kelby’s “Photoshop CS3 for Digital Photographers” and Corey Barker’s “Photoshop in Motion” as well as a 1 year subscription to Layers Magazine. This is what you need to do: Go to the Contact Page and click on the “Layers TV” drop down. From there, enter in your Name, email address, and the answer to the contest. If you check Scott Kelby’s blog for Monday June 1, he did a specific shoot for a keyboard. Name the keyboard, and the keyboard model number.

The contest will close Thursday 5PM and the winner will be announced on Friday morning. Good Luck to all of you!

That’s it for today everyone. Have a wonderful week and be sure you stop on in tomorrow!