Pacific Internet - Ukiah, California

Getting Started with a Website

Advanced Web Techniques

Pacific Internet can help you with your website development and consulting. Please contact us if you are interested in having Pacific Internet webmasters help you with your website design or functionality.

Most of these features are available only for hosted domains.
Contact us with questions.

 

Feedback Forms: FormMail

There is a generic perl script you can use to write a form which takes a user's input and returns it to you in a nice organized format. You can even customize it just by adding hidden configuration fields to the form.

Download the form.html.txt file to work with. Right click the link below and select "Save as..." Save the files to a working directory on your computer.

Edit this file and customize it to taste, putting in your own <BODY> and header and footer. Don't change any of the <INPUT> tags inside the <FORM> block, unless you'd like to customize your script to handle different data.

Look through the file and change whatever is in [brackets] in the file. Make sure that you find and change the following line:

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="recipient" VALUE="[your username]@pacific.net">
Replace[your username] with your actual login name, replacing the brackets as well; so the line would become:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="recipient" VALUE="username@pacific.net">
When you've finished, upload the file to your webpages directory, and place a link to it somewhere in your main page. Now, if all has gone well, you should have a working feedback form!

If you'd like to customize your form:

FormMail is configured using hidden form fields. All the fields you can use are fully documented at Matt's Script Archive; in particular take a look at the "Optional Form Fields" section, which describles all sorts of options from what output file it should use (if you'd like to thank the user for filling out the form, for example), to the format of the e-mail output that gets mailed to you, to what fields you want to be mandatory for the user to fill out-- it's all there.

Password Protected Directory

Hosted Domains are able to password protect any directory within the hosted web site. The simplest way to do this is use our 'password-protect' script. Just login with an ssh client and type password-protect. The script will guide you through the process of adding a username and password to protect a directory. If you have difficulty with this, you can just drop us an email and we'll be happy to setup the password for you. If you need more robust password management, please contact us and we'll explain what options are available to you.

Site Statistics

Hosted Domains have a statistics package installed that allows domain name owners to view information about who is visiting the site. You can see what links visitors are clicking on, what links are most popular, how they got to your site and more. Terms that visitors entered into a remote search engine are shown, so you can see what 'search terms' brought people to your site through the various search engines. Statistics are gathered from webserver log files and are generated at least weekly. For information about how to access your site's statistics online, please ask us!

MySQL Databases

All Hosting customers have access to a MySQL database. MySQL is a high performance sql database that makes having a large, fast and dynamic website possible. Databases are best used for storing rows and columns of similar or similarly used data. MySQL can be used to store product data, customer data, order data, html, text, pdfs, word documents, or anything else. Many 'off the shelf' products available for website use, such as bulletin boards, forums, photo albums, blog software, and others use MySQL to store data. Not all hosting customers need a database, so we do not automatically setup a db with every hosting account. Please contact us if you'd like us to setup a MySQL database for your account. There is no charge for creating a MySQL database for a Pacific Internet Hosting account. Please include your domain name in the request email. Note that additional programming may be required to access & use the database, depending on how you plan to use it within your site, so you may need to hire a programmer to help with this. Contact us for rates and recommendations or with other questions.

PHP & Perl scripts

PHP and Perl are 'server-side' programming languages used by webmasters and programmers to build dynamic website content. Dynamic content, as opposed to 'static' content, responds to input. So, if you want a form that a visitor fills out to be emailed to you - you use a script to process it. If you want a shopping cart to 'put something in a basket', you use a script to process the input. The possibilities are limitless. Our webservers support these two very popular development languages as well as several other less well known languages. Contact us with questions.

Ecommerce, Shopping Carts, Order Forms and Security

We are asked "what shopping cart do you recommend?" at least once a week. The answer is that no single shopping cart works well for all sites. It depends on many things like:

  • What you are selling - is it a product or a service?
  • How you ship it? UPS, FEDEX, US only, worldwide? Flat rate or by weight or qty?
  • How many products do you sell? Just a couple books or a whole product line?
  • What about colors, sizes, options? How many choices does a customer need to make before they can check out?
  • How will you process payments? At your location 'later', or 'real-time' via an Internet Payment Gateway, or Paypal or..?
  • What about order tracking and customer contact?
  • Would an single page order form work, or do you need a shopping cart?
  • Do you need SSL security? Are you taking credit cards directly?
  • All hosting accounts have access to free shared ssl or can purchase www.yourdomain.com SSL certificates at a discount. Contact us for more information about SSL certificates.

Help

Pacific Internet can help you with your website development and consulting. Please contact us if you are interested in having Pacific Internet webmasters help you with your website design or functionality.