What are the programs for designing online forms?

Answer 1

You really don't need any kind of software at all but a text editor. A form is just a web page using a subset of HTML or XHTML. Here's the code for a very basic form:

<form action = "readForm.php"

method = "post" >

<fieldset>

<label for = "fName">first name</label>

<input name = "fName" id = "fName" />

<label for = "lName">last name</label>

<input name = "lName" id = "lName" />

<label for = "email">email</label>

<input name = "email" id = "email" />

<button type = "submit">

submit

</button>

</fieldset>

</form>

This form will create a series of labels and text boxes. The user can enter data into the form. I have not included any formatting in this example, but the form's visual appearance can be improved with CSS.

HTML and CSS are all you need to create forms, but if you want to do something with the data, you need a real programming language like PHP or JavaScript. This example assumes there is a program on the server called readForm.php that knows how to read the data from the form and then does something with it (frequently store data in a database, email it to somebody, or something similar.)

There are programs like Dreamweaver and Expression Web which allow you to build a form interactively like a word processor, but it's really better to learn how to do this by hand.

See my profile for much more information or to ask a follow-up question.