Thread: Thank you page and menu buttons

My domain name is gordonpatzer.com, would you please take a look at my BlueVoda problems. (I have watched, and re-watched, the BlueVoda videos, which are extremely helpful for as far as they go. I am a novice at all this and, to be honest, I think I wish I would have invested the many hours and work in FrontPage, even though I don’t know how to use it now, instead of Blue Voda. It seems surely that FrontPage is better designed with problems worked out along with more flexibility…as you can read, at this point, I am frustrated with my experience with BlueVoda and VodaHost).

Recently, after much and many work, hours and frustration, I published, for the first time, my 8-page VodaHost website (www.gordonpatzer.com) and the messages that came back said they published successfully. However, my problems include the email-contact page, as well as my other problems, as I state in my 3 topics below. Help on these will be appreciated greatly:

(1) How do I link my major website pages to the menu buttons that I've created? I don't want to use the hyperlink button function because that then changes my menu button names to the same hyperlink style as hyperlinked text and I want the menu button names simply to be text/words with no underscores and colors, but yet I want to keep the typical hyperlink style for other such uses. Because no menu buttons served my needs (such as my need for long menu button names that needed two lines of text arranged vertically), I created my own text buttons along with a round-rectangle shape around them. I then linked the shape of these respective menu buttons to the website pages, but people want to click on the menu button name, and not necessarily the shape, to go to the respective website page. So, how do I have a click on either the menu button word or the shape surrounding it to take the reader to the respective website page (without creating a style change typically caused by the standard hyperlink function)?

(2) I created a Thank-you-for-submitting page to acknowledge persons who send me an email though my website contact page using the ABVFP contact form that I created--for which I simply modified/enhanced/personalized the ABVFP contact form format. However, my thank-you-for-submitting page that I created does not get sent to people who send me email and, instead, the very basic non-enhanced ABVFP thank-you-for-submitting page goes instead.

The thank-you-for-submitting page that I created (or, rather, modified) to acknowledge persons who send me an email though my website contact page using the ABVFP contact form, I simply modified/enhanced/personalized the ABVFP contact form that came with my respective zip download (thankyou_page, with HTML extension). However, even though I changed the page extension to php as the tutorial instructions said to do, my thank-you-for-submitting page that I created does not get sent to people who send me email and, instead, the original ABVFP thank-you-for-submitting page goes instead with the DB Technosystems large printed name and the instructions in large red letters at the top -- "Your Header Here!" -- and in large red letters at the side--"Your Menu Here!"

I did insert my header and my menu, saved it, changed the extension to php, and published it to my website (at least I think I did--I am very new to this). I checked by VodaHost CPanel (www.gordonpatzer.com) and I do see the page with the extension (thankyou.php) in my public_html file, but yet this personalized thank you page (after inserting the header and menu as instructed) does not get sent to people who submit an email message to me through my website (www.gordonpatzer.com) contact page.

As I stated above, I am new (very new) to this, so anything is possible in that I am apparently overlooking some critical step.


Sincerely,

gordon787

1. You have your menu buttons that you created linked to your pages, that is good, but you can also link your text - you can create a style for this linked text .. you will see when you highlight this text and go to insert and choose link, the box where you apply the link, also contains an area for appearance, choose this and choose create new, ADD a new link style - you can change color, size, bold or not, underlined or not as well, once you create the link style which will be number 1 to start with, apply that style to the linked text. You can have the exact style you are looking for .. no underscores etc. - You can create as many link styles as you prefer.

You will notice there are 4 areas of a link style that you can change.
Linked
Visited
Active
Hover
For each of these 4, click on them to change new link style, you will choose color, tick or untick underline, bold or italic ...

For help with your contact form, if would be best to copy and paste your questions related to that in the form area of this forum.

Good Luck with your site, I believe you are doing very well, you will become more familiar with blue voda everyday and you will receive plenty of help right here. Not to be discouraged. Good Luck ...

Hi,

See if I can help a little here, first point one. I think what you need here is the menu bar function and not Nav bar. If you go to the top in bluevoda, insert - extra - menu bar this will give you either a horizontal or vertical menu bar that has no underscores but a nice hover over effect 9changes colour to what you want, I did a mockup for you here http://www.2020visiongroup.co.uk/demo.html
Let me know if this is not what you want, will have a look at your other points shortly.

Regards
Paul

I thank immensely, both Paulbarl and LadyEye below. Your quick and explicit reply is appreciated greatly and I will now immeul try the suggestions/guidance/help offered in both your messages.

Thank you again, I appreciate this greatly.

gordon787

No problem, notice that you have done this already, well done. Don't forget that the background colour to the link can also be changed (notice this is grey at present, ok if you planned it this way) If you wanted to tie it in with the image chose a blue shade that matches the image etc.

Paul

hello; I would like to add my 2cents. If you want to have a navigation bar but not have it look like one, such as
www.tprspecialties.com
then you could just place an invisible image over the complete name and area and link the image to the page. Now you don't have to worry about any change of color and you can have any graphics you want.
hope this helps.
As for your form, I'm sure Naval will come up with the right answer for you. He is a genius.
Mrmagoo144
www.videopostcards.info

I appreciate the expert suggestions put forth by paulbarl, LadyEye, and mrmagoo400. While all three suggestions are helpful, what worked perfectly for me was the suggestion/direction/advice by paulbarl. The insert-extra-menu directive was particuarly appreciated because it spelled out explicilty the steps needed to get where I need to go.

(As a footnote, the insert-extra-menu solution for me did not directly solve my two-line length menu button label problem, but it certinly seemed to provide a workable indirect alternative to make my two-line length menu button labels work by perfomring a separate insert-extra-menu procedure for only the second line as a separate menu item and then just moving it to the same button. By the way, I seemed to have needed to create a seperate inset-extra-menu button for each of my 8 buttons rather than to place all the buttons in one of these insert-extra-menu procedures: www.gordonpatzer.com.)

Thank you again. Your help was a life saver and greatly appreciated as such.

gordon787

MRMAGOO400,

I like your suggestion below and, now, how do I communicate my email/thankyou page problem to "NAVAL" as referenced in your message?

My domain name is gordonpatzer.com, would you/NAVAL/someone knowledgeable please take a look at my BlueVoda problem concerning the email contact page. I created a Thank-you-for-submitting page to acknowledge persons who send me an email though my website contact page using the ABVFP contact form that I created--for which I simply modified/enhanced/personalized the ABVFP contact form format. However, when people use my website contact page to send me an email message, my thank-you-for-submitting page that I created does not get sent to people who send me email. Instead, the very basic non-enhanced ABVFP thank-you-for-submitting page gets sent intead...and, now, even worse, as I have tried to fix that problem, I've created another problem in that now that non-enhanced ABVFP thank-you-for-submitting page doesn't even get sent anymore and instead the sender gets a "can't find website page" message.

The thank-you-for-submitting page that I created (or, rather, modified) to acknowledge persons who send me an email though my website contact page using the ABVFP contact form, I simply modified/enhanced/personalized the ABVFP contact form that came with my respective zip download (thankyou_page, with HTML extension). However, even though I changed the page extension to php as the tutorial instructions said to do, my thank-you-for-submitting page that I created does not get sent to people who send me email and, instead, the original ABVFP thank-you-for-submitting page goes instead with the DB Technosystems large printed name and the instructions in large red letters at the top -- "Your Header Here!" -- and in large red letters at the side--"Your Menu Here!"

I did insert my header and my menu, saved it, changed the extension to php, and published it to my website (at least I think I did--I am very new to this). I checked by VodaHost CPanel (www.gordonpatzer.com) and I do see the page with the extension (thankyou.php) in my public_html file, but yet this personalized thank you page (after inserting the header and menu as instructed) does not get sent to people who submit an email message to me through my website (www.gordonpatzer.com) contact page.

As I stated above, I am new (very new) to this, so anything is possible in that I am apparently overlooking some critical steps.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts and assistance.

gordon787

just be patient, naval or Andy or someone with forms knowledge will tell you your mistake. In my case I did not fill out the form correctly. Once fixed the form works great.
Mrmagoo144

Thank you, gordon787.

Hi,

Your form is setup correctly and sends the info to ABVFO. This sends out the email to the autoresponder correctly (i tested it so i know).

However, it is obvious that you have made some mistakes when setting up your form in the ABVFP control panel:

1. The error page URL is http://www.gordonpatzer.com/ABVFP/errorpage.php instead of the correct http://www.gordonpatzer.com/errorpage.php

2. The thank you page URL is also wrong. Should be http://www.gordonpatzer.com/thankyou.html

Edit them and you will be ok.

Navaldesign -- Thank you. It helped, what you said, and I am close to completion and success but I am still not quite there yet concerning my website: www.gordonpatzer.com.

I think I might need to do some Blue FTP uploading, however, to be honest, I have no idea when an FTP upload needs to be done, or if "publishing" a page takes care of FTP uploading the page. Or, when I go to the VodaHost CPanel X, I think there might be problems in what I see under "file manager," specifically what I see and don't see concerning the thankyou.html and errorpage.php files under Public_HTML and Public_HTML/ABVFP???

In any event, here is my problem. First, I made the change you stated in your prior message about the ABVFP Administrator Login/Control Panel changes to my contact forms. Specifically, I removed the ABVFP from the URL address. And now my only problem seems to be the "thank you" acknowledgement message/page to people who email me through my website contact page.

Would you please give it a try and see what I have overlooked or messed-up on doing? When I try to send an email message through the email contact page, I do not get the intended thank you page-message, but instead I get the following message on my computer screen:

HTTP 404 Not Found

[IMG]res://ieframe.dll/info_48.png[/IMG] The webpage cannot be found

HTTP 404
Most likely causes:

• <LI id=causeErrorInAddress>There might be a typing error in the address.
• If you clicked on a link, it may be out of date.

What you can try:

[IMG]res://ieframe.dll/bullet.png[/IMG] Retype the address.

[IMG]res://ieframe.dll/bullet.png[/IMG] Go back to the previous page.

[IMG]res://ieframe.dll/bullet.png[/IMG] Go to and look for the information you want.

[IMG]res://ieframe.dll/down.png[/IMG] More information

The script works just fine, however, neither the thank you page or the errorpage can be found. I am 100&#37; sure that you have mistaken both URLS in the ABVFP control panel.

There is a small trick to avoid mistakes: copy from here the thank you page URL:

http://www.gordonpatzer.com/thankyou.html

and paste it in your ABVFP . Then do the same for the error page:

http://www.gordonpatzer.com/errorpage.php

And everything will be ok.

Several items:

(1) Thank you to everyone on this Forum who has assisted me as I have now successfully set-up and published my website: www.gordonpatzer.com.

(2) Foremost, thank you to Naval / Navaldesign. His replies/help has been invaluable and appreciated accordingly.

(3) To Navaldesign--Your last reply below provided good advice but not pertinent to my situation. It is certainly good direction to literally copy a URL address rather than type it, this turned out not to be my problem, at least not my last problem. For your information, the solution came ultimately when as I was checking and re-checking and re-checking my ABVFP Control Panel based on your directions, I noticed a small fatal flaw on my part--I had everything correct on that page except in the line in the Control Panel labelled: "Uploader Folder:", I had typed "http//www...." and I had accidentally omitted the colon after http, so with that change (to http://wwww....) my "thank you reply page to emailers through my website" now works perfectly. Thank you immensely for your help.

(4) Now, sort-of a final clean-up question (especially as I begin to now finalize my second website address as an "add-on domain" to my VodaHost account)---When I go to my ABVFP Contact Panel, I see there are 8 different Contact Forms listed (all that I created accidentally as I was first learning). My two questions: (1) how do I know which one of the 8 in that ABVFP Contact Panel is the valid one and (2) how do I delete all the other seven contact forms listed there?

Thank you again for all your earlier help, which dealt with much more important questions to me than my #4 question immediately above.

gordon787

The correct form setup on your ABVFP control panel, is the one that has, as Formid, the same as your form.

In order to delete the others, you need to do the following (might seem a bit complicated, but it is really easy):

Connect to your account CP (not the ABVFP CP).
Depending on your server, you might have the new or the old interface for CP:

If it is the old, there is only one link for MySQL Databases. Click it. When the the page shows up, select, at the VERY BOTTOM of the page, the link to phpMyAdmin.

If it is the new interface, the link to phpMyAdmin already exists in your CP home page. Click it.

So now a new page with phpMyAdmin has shown up (whatever the case was, old or new CP).
Select, to the left, the database ABVFP. Then, under it, there should appear, depending on the attempts that you had done, one or more tables. Select the table ABVFP_forms.

Then on the right part, Select Browse.

The listings in the database, created by your attempts to set up your form, will appear. Select the listings that you want to delete (so, you must NOT select the one with the correct Formid, as well as the first one, which is the example form) and go under the table of the listings, you will see a drop down "With selected: " and various choices in the drop down, select "Delete". This will delete the selected listings. You may now close phpMyadmin.

About the missing " :" in your upload folder URL. This must not have been the only problem. You see, ABVFP is my own creation and i know the script by memory. That missing : could affect the script if one uploads a file, because, of course, in that case, the upload URL is needed. But, i had tried the script without uploading any file, and it worked perfectly sending the mails, but could not find either the thank you or the error page. So, those were also wrong. Of course, you went a bit further, corrected these issues, then you had another issue with the uploadfolder URL, and i'm really glad you found and solved it.

Thank you Naval/Navaldesign,

You are both a whiz and a patient knowledgeable whiz.

Precisely as you stated above, I have deleted the many unnecessary trial forms from my ABVFP Control Panel by going through my VodaHost Control Panel. And, to my happiness, I apparently did it correctly because the thankyou page sent to emailers continues to work perfectly.

One final question: When I send an email message through my www.gordonpatzer.com website contact page, that message goes apparently both to my VodaHost webmail and, equally or more important, to my email address that I use on a daily routine basis (gpatzer@roosevelt.edu). However, when I try to send an email message directly to gordon@gordonpatzer.com, the email message does not come to my daily routine email address (gpatzer@roosevelt.edu).

How can I set my VodaHost and/or ABVFP settings so that email sent directly to me at gordon@gordonpatzer.com would come to me at gpatzer@roosevelt.edu as well as to my VodaHost web email, comparable to now what happens apparently to email sent to me at gordon@gordonpatzer.com at/through my www.gordonpatzer.com website?

Thank you.

gordon787

Go in your CP and set a forwarder for your email address. This way all message sent to gordon@gordonpatzer.com will be forwarded to gpatzer@roosevelt.edu

I was anticipating that I would not be again asking your assistance concerning my current thread, but your last guidance in terms of setting an email forwarder seems not to work for me. It looks to be super simple, but there must be some other setting that I must also make (such as in Outlook Express, but I don't think so).

First, as you instructed, I went to my VodaHost cPanel, logged in, and added a mail forwarder for all mail sent to gordon@gordonpatzer.com, to be automatically forwarded to me at gpatzer@roosevelt.edu. In fact, when I checked in the "default address maintenance" in the VodaHost cPanel, the message states that "all unrouted mail for gordonpatzer.com" will be sent to gpatzer@roosevelt.edu (see copy of that message below). Also, in that part of my VodaHost cPanel, (as I have copied below), it even states that "Current Mail Forwarders" include: gordon@gordonpatzer.com >>>> gpatzer@roosevelt.edu, but yet my testing email that I send to gordon@gordonpatzer.com does not come to me at gpatzer@roosevelt.edu; even though mail I send thorugh my website email contact form (www.gordonpatzer.com) does come to me at gpatzer@roosevelt.edu.

Now what do I do concering mail sent to gordon@gordonpatzer.com to be automatically forwarded to me at gpatzer@roosevelt.edu?

Thank you.

gordon787


,

Add a New Domain Forwarder

All email sent to gordonpatzer.com will now be redirected to gpatzer@roosevelt.edu Warning, changing default address for gordonpatzer.com since an email address was specified instead of a domain name.

Forwarding Maintenance

Current Forwarders gordon@gordonpatzer.comgpatzer@roosevelt.edu

Sorry, but if you have set a mail forwarder and it doesn't work, i don't know what could be wrong.
Setting up " catch all " email address has nothing to do with the forwarding part.

Please do not copy / paste parts of your CP screens, as it creates problems with the links contained. I had to delete part of your post, as it created a login check.

I suggest that you test again your email forwarding. Send an email to your domain email address. If no email is forwarded to your roosevelt.edu adress, first of all check that this email has actually arrived in your web mail. If it is there, i can only suggest that you submit a support ticket asking the help desk to see why it is not forwarded.

All is now complete and working here at www.gordonpatzer.com in Chicago, Illinois early Monday morning, about 12:30 a.m. on October 22, 2007.

My last item was the email forwarder. And that seemed to have taken about an hour for the VodaHost server to establish the connection or whatever after I had entered my forwarding address and confirmed it. Now about an hour later, everything is working as it should on and in connection to my website, including my email, email thank you page, and now email forwarder.

Thank you again to everyone who has assisted and particuarly to Naval/Navaldesign for his expertise, his assistance, and his patience with me and my newness to all this.

With this message I am now closing out this thread that I started about 15 to 20 messages ago.

Best wishes to everyone at and in connection with VodaHost.

gordon787