Introduction

Designing surveys is an art unto itself, requiring careful analysis, skill, and an absolute attention to detail. On the other hand, coding or developing a Web page that contains an electronic form that collects the data from a willing participant is often just as arduous. That is, until Microsoft® FrontPage® 98 or higher was released. If you use Microsoft FrontPage to both design and manage your Web site, you are in good hands. FrontPage makes developing and publishing a Web form or survey a breeze. Moreover, it doesn't require that you know any programming or scripting languages that interactively collect and dynamically display results from a database as you will see in this tutorial. But before I move on to actually creating an online survey in this demonstration, there are few things you should understand about designing a form from scratch.

The first step in designing any survey, be it a one-button opinion poll or an elaborate multi-page form, is to sketch out the survey on paper or develop it in Microsoft Word or use Microsoft Visio®, a powerful, easy to use diagramming tool. Next, carefully think through all of the variables or questions to elicit the best response, then lay out the fields in logical order, and most importantly keep the form concise. Nothing is more irritating than having a seemingly non-relevant question pop up from nowhere while taking a survey. You need to keep in mind the participant's time constraints and interest. It's also not a bad idea to tell the survey participant where to find the published results of your survey or how you plan to use it. Another important tip is to refrain from collecting personal information about the survey taker, obviously for reasons of privacy.

Tip: There are several good books on developing Web surveys. Listed below are links to developing Web surveys on Amazon.com:

• Designing and Conducting Survey Research: A Comprehensive Guide
• Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method
• Marketing: Creating and Keeping Customers in an eCommerce World

Once you have created a final draft survey, it's time to begin the process of developing the electronic form in FrontPage to capture your survey information. Essentially, you have two main choices on how to create a form; you can do it manually which is more time consuming and difficult, but provides more flexibility in form design. Or you can choose to use the Form Page Wizard in FrontPage. Either method, allows for total customization of a form or survey, but the Form Page Wizard is much faster and easier to use than manually creating fields and tables for design and layout of an online form.

Therefore, this tutorial will focus primarily on the FrontPage Form Page Wizard (and the Database Results Wizard discussed below)  to achieve the desired results of collecting data online, submitting it to a database, and then publishing it back to the Web for participants and other interested parties to view. The online survey that I will create is an actual form used on the IT Specialist.com Web site to collect a variety of responses to questions regarding the emergence of Web Services, the Tablet PC, and electronic books designed for IT professionals. Essentially, the form is designed to help the publisher of IT Specialist.com better understand their audience's desires and needs for technical information and in what direction the IT world in general is heading.

Next, we'll proceed to actually constructing the IT Specialist Industry Survey by starting FrontPage and opening Microsoft Word for cutting and pasting questions directly into the Form Page Wizard. But, before you begin developing the form in FrontPage it might be good idea to print out a copy of the survey questions located in the appendix to help you follow along in this tutorial. Or you can simply click to each question independently via hyperlinks located in the following step-by-step tutorial.

Let's get started by clicking here and going to the next page in the tutorial.

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