Creating Online Surveys Using FrontPage version 2002

Building an Interactive Survey Form - Part One

The fist step in building our survey form is to install and open the Microsoft FrontPage. FrontPage versions 2000 and later now combine the Web editor and Explorer into one integrated environment for creating and managing all files within an FrontPage based Web site. In FrontPage 2002, you are instantly ready to begin creating or manage a Web site using the new integrated Folder List and Navigation panes or windows (Figure 2). We'll begin this tutorial with the existing Web site previously mentioned, IT Specialist.com.

Step 1: Click on Start / Programs / Microsoft FrontPage. This opens the integrated design environment of FrontPage. For demonstration purposes, we'll open IT Specialist on our firm's local development server, which is a Windows XP design station running Microsoft FrontPage® 2002 Server Extensions. This allows us to fully test all design and programming functions without having to use our staging server.

Step 2: In this step, we'll open the IT Specialist Web development site by clicking on File / Recent Webs  and then selecting itspecialist from the branching menu (Figure 1). Note: This is a unique shortcut offered in FrontPage. It's similar to the Recently Used Files list in Microsoft Office applications and saves several steps in locating and opening files. Next, we will begin the actual process of creating a new Web form for the site by using the Form Page Wizard in FrontPage.

Figure 1 Opening an existing FrontPage Web site.

Step 3: Click on File / New Page or Web. A Task Pane, new for FrontPage 2002, opens on the right providing you with a list of tasks from which to choose. In this example, we'll begin with the task category, New from template / Page Templates (Figure 2) on the lower part of the Tasks pane. Selecting the Page Templates option opens a dialog box from which you can select the Form Page Wizard.

Figure 2  The FrontPage Form Page Template.

Tip: This may be a good time to open up or fetch your final draft of the survey questions that you previously wrote for the online form. If you used Microsoft Word, then open the file in preparation for cutting and pasting questions into the wizard prompts. The survey questions will also help guide you through the wizard as you will see in the following steps.

Step 4: Next, you are presented with the Form Page Wizard itself as shown in Figure 3 below.  It's essential that you be prepared before proceeding with this form wizard. You will need to think through each question carefully or else you will be required to do a lot of tedious manual tweaking of the form. Although you can move forward and backward in the wizard once you started building the form to correct mistakes, you need to pay attention in order for the wizard to save you time and energy in developing the survey.

Warning: Once you click the Finish button at the end of the wizard, there's no going back to fix errors via the wizard. Any subsequent changes you make will have to be handled manually, which requires understanding basic forms fundamentals in FrontPage.

Figure 3 Starting the FrontPage Form Page Wizard.

Next, we'll move through the Form Page Wizard to complete the basics of the form. Once we get into creating a database to store the results, I will provide screen by screen descriptions to guide you through database creation.

Tip: FrontPage automatically creates a Microsoft Access database for dynamic forms. You will be able to easily access the database to modify or delete records using Access by clicking on a special directory and file, described later in this tutorial. However, you must have Microsoft Access installed in order to use it to accomplish this. It might be a good idea to stop at this point and install Microsoft Access if you haven't already done so.

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