home > web hosts > webs

How to Add Email Forms to Homestead

Adding an email form to your web site hosted on Homestead is very easy. You have the option of adding the form with an external HTML editor and then uploading the file via FTP, or you may use Homestead's Site Builder software. Unfortunately, I am unable to get their Site Builder software to run locally on my computer. Due to this, I cannot offer a tutorial for using Site Builder. I recommend that you instead use one of the HTML editors to the left and then simply FTP your files to the server.

A demonstration form hosted on Homestead can be seen here.

1. Create Your Form HTML

The first step in integrating an email form into your website is to build the actual HTML code for the form. The easiest and quickest way to create the form code is to use myContactForm.com.

myContactForm.com features a free online wizard that steps you through the entire form building process. myContactForm.com has just about any feature you could ask for including auto-responders, CAPTCHA, file attachements, CSS styling, data exports (Excel, CSV, Text, HTML, etc.), pre-made templates, and much more.

Click Here to read a tutorial on creating the form HTML using myContactForm.com.

2. Paste Your Form HTML into Your Website

Read one of the tutorials for various HTML editors to receive instructions about inserting your form HTML into your web page.

3. Upload Your Form to Homestead

Use your typically FTP client to upload your web page containing the email form to the Homestead server.

Common Problems Users Experience:

The web page is showing a bunch of jumbled HTML instead of a form.

When this occurs, it is caused by the form HTML being pasted into the Design View as text instead of pasting the code into Code View of your site.

I submit the form and get a form location error.

This is typically caused when you are testing a form that has not yet been published to your live web site. If you are still having this problem once you have uploaded the file to the live web site, please read below.

If you are using myContactForm.com, you need to login there and make sure that you've set the Form Location setting to the proper URL of your form.

a. Login to myContactForm.com

b. Click the Edit Button

c. Click the Basic Form Information Button

d. Enter all variations of the URL where the form would appear. Typically this is the full URL of your web form with and without the www subdomain.

e. Click