newsletter sign-up form etc

[Ant]

Can someone help me figure out how to add a newsletter signup

link, form, (not sure what it's proper term is)to my website.

 

I have searched and cant seem to pin down exactly what I need.

 

I don't think a simple "email us for our newsletter" link is "correct" That seems easy if you don't have hundreds of requests coming through. Although it also seems like an archaic "too simple" way of doing it

 

Maybe I cant find a straight answer online because I'm not using the right terminology?

 

I have read about companies like Constant Contact, who I assume I will need to use to send the newsletter for me since I cant use regular email etc.for large group emails.

 

But whats the right way to add a newsletter sign-up form?

 

Do the addresses get sent to a company like constant contact? Does the client(website owner) get the list(addresses) and then send the content(newsletter) & list to companies like constant contact for them to send out?? What do these lists look like when they come from a script?

 

Is this all done using scripts? Which is something I really don't understand and have never seen first hand.

 

 

 

Thanks for any help on straightening this out? Sorry for all the questions!

 

Ant

[falkencreative]

I think it depends on what functionality you need. If you simply need to collect a user's email address and have it emailed somewhere, a simple PHP contact form could do that. Whoever receives those emails from the website that contain the email address the user submitted would need to manually add/remove addresses from the mailing list. This makes sense if you want a quick, easy method, but keeping the list updated manually will be a pain if you have lots of requests coming through.

 

If you are looking for more advanced functionality, such as automatically keeping track of a members in a mailing list, giving members the ability to unsubscribe, etc, look at ConstantContact/MailChimp/etc -- they have email signup forms that you can add to your website that integrate with their services. (Check their websites for a list of their services/pricing details) I imagine there are also free/open source scripts that you can download that perform a lot of this functionality, though they probably require setting up a database and other various configuration steps.

[Ant]

Thanks Falken.

 

I didn't realize mailchip etc had a form that I could use directly on the site.

 

I figured the do it yourself type scripts were going to be out of my league.

 

I just signed up for mailchimp. We'll see how it works.

 

Ant

[Ant]

Well, I got an account on Mailchimp and have the sign up form linked to open a new window on the site.

 

It was pretty easy. i chose what kind of form I wanted and was able to stylize it a bit. Once it was done i copied and pasted the "source code" and added it as a separate html page linked to my pages.

 

I tried saving it as .php but it didn't work for some reason.

 

 

 

Falken, thanks for clarifying what my options were and steering me towards the 2 companies.

 

I can actually SEE how these things work and understand it better. Of course it's not actually live and I haven't used mailchimps services yet other than setting up a form etc.

 

Ant

[falkencreative]

I tried saving it as .php but it didn't work for some reason.

If you want help with this, you'll need to be a bit more detailed -- what did you try, and what results are you getting that show you that "it didn't work"?

[Ant]

Falken, when I change the extension from html to php it links to the page but shows the source code rather than the form.

 

I thought i could simply change my html pages to php.

I think i have forgotten how PHP actually works.

 

Maybe I need to revisit the post I made here to remember.

 

BTW my index page is presently .html maybe thats why?

 

Ant

Edited May 19, 2010 by Ant