Forms

If you need to gather specific information from the visitors to your website, you'll probably need a form. There are two different ways that you can view the information that visitors submit: either by having each submission emailed to you, or by storing the submissions in a format which you can then analyse in an application such as Excel.

If you are using the Web CMS please contact the Web Office for help setting up your form.

Results by email

The simplest type of form will simply send the contents of the submitted form to an email address you specify. This is ideal for more straightforward forms, for example if you had a form which was used to collect email addresses and comments from visitors to your website.

Contact the Web Office for help setting up this kind of form.

Results you can download as a spreadsheet

For more complicated forms, especially those containing data that you want to analyse in detail, you can set up forms that will allow you to download the results so that you can view them in an application such as Excel. There are two different University systems that will allow you to do this:

1. Feedback system

Principally designed for gathering student feedback at the end of a course or module, the feedback system requires no technical knowledge at all. You simply define the questions you want to ask and the type of answers you want to get back (free text, multi-choice, etc).

Results can be browsed online or downloaded as a CSV file for processing in a spreadsheet. The feedback system can even automatically select respondents at random to be winners of prizes offered as incentives. Everyone who fills the form in must have a York username and password.

The service is maintained by Computing Service and details are available on their Feedback System web pages.

2. Questionnaire system

If you want to have complete control over your form and just need somewhere to store the responses, the Questionnaire System is what you need. Forms don't need a York username and password so it can be used for anonymous surveys or with external users. Simply create your web page featuring your HTML form and a 'thank you' page that you want respondents to see after completing the form. Once these are ready, visit Computing Service's Questionnaire System web pages to configure the system for your particular case. Once some responses have come in, you'll be able to download them for processing in a spreadsheet.

You'll need a web account username and password in order to use the questionnaire system and you'll need a degree of HTML / CSS knowledge to create the form. Contact the Web Office if you need help with either of these - web-office@york.ac.uk

If you have trouble with the Questionnaire System itself, contact Computing Service - itsupport@york.ac.uk

 

Who to contact