Rescue Charity needs help with coding.

[chrisjl]

I everyone.
Hope I am in the righ place to leave this post.
I am a founder member and webmaster of our new seal rescue organisation on the East Coast of Yorkshire.
I have finished our website and it is now live, only problem is our contact form is not working properly and I am at a loss at how to fix it.
Are you willing to help us out please?
You can view the page here:
www.eastcoastsealrescue.com/contact.html

Appreciate any help or advice.

Chris

[djr33]

Here is the form tag from your source code:
<form id="form1" name="form1" method="post" action="mailto:email1* , email2" class="c14">
(*I edited your email address when posting this here so you don't get too much extra spam from anyone who might see the address.)


Here are some things to look at:
1. Your method is "post" and this refers to a certain type of connection to a server. Since you are not connecting to a server (instead, you are using mailto), you may want to omit this or perhaps use "get" (since it's like a "default"). See if that helps.
2. You have two email addresses listed in the action. I don't know if this is allowed or not. Try using just one to see if that fixes it. It may not be a problem.


There are three different ways to submit a form:
1. Use "mailto". This is actually the worst because it requires that the user has an active email program on their computer. For many users, this may not be the case. For example, they might have an account with yahoo, hotmail or gmail. Also, this means that your emails are in the source code so you might get spam. Honestly, it will be more reliable to just ask them to send you an email and list your address. As is, they will still need to send it to you from their email program (if it even opens).
2. Use a free form mailer. You can point the action of the form to an external site that will send the information to your email address for free. This won't give you much control, but it will eliminate the need for the visitor to send you an email and it will appear more professional. However, it won't give you complete control and it will use an external website so the visitor will go to a different page when sending it and you may get ads in the sent messages. There are hundreds of services like this and many are easy to use. Look around and find one you like.
3. The "best" but most complex method is to use your own serverside code, such as PHP or CGI, that will receive the data and send it to your email. This is exactly like (2), but it will give you full control-- of course you need to program it all yourself though. There are some free scripts available that you can use, but it can often be difficult to setup if you haven't done this before. Don't be afraid to try though. Note that this requires that your server supports PHP or a similar serverside language.


Note: for either (2) or (3), you will again need to have action="post" because you are sending it to a server.



I hope that helps you get started and decide what to do.

[traq]

try adding enctype="text/plain" to the opening <form> tag. (I don't know about the multiple addresses either.) But, as djr says, using mailto: is highly unreliable.