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Ask DN : How do i add a contact form to my website without any back-end knowledge?
over 7 years ago from Ray Yip, Designer & Developer
Alex Heeton, over 7 years ago
C'mon, you really can't empathise with this? It may not be rocket science but there is no way you can say that learning several new technologies is simpler/easier than dropping in a single line of code from a 3rd party service.
And blindly copy-pasting code without understanding it is never a good idea. In my experience that only ever leads to more confusion and stress when something isn't working and you need to debug it. Removing that stress by offloading the server-side can be very useful for some people.
It can actually be very insulting for you to keep saying it's "simple". You find it simple, others do not. Empathy is very, very important.
Thomas Michael Semmler, over 7 years ago (edited over 7 years ago )
I can emphasize with it, which is why I also think it is needed to know the basics of how the server works. Knowing css/html/js is enough in theory, but in practice is almost never is.
Even the back-end stuff is totally learnable and not as hard as it may seem at first. But so many designers in our imposter-syndrome poisoned community tell newcomers that all they need to know is html & css and they are good to go, because everything else is managed by tools - and I think that's a dangerous attitude.
I think it's important, to not lie to new members of the web community, and pretend like all they need is to know html & css, and a little bit of javascript. It is enough for a start, but you'll have to keep going. But this could grow into a debate that shouldn't be held here.
Fabricio Rosa Marques, over 7 years ago
It's not about learning the entire thing, but rather about learning the necessary and relevant stuff to achieve your goal (Hacking spirit, etc.). Again, if he's got some sort of programming foundation (Javascript?) reading what those scripts do is not only understandable, but also informative and enriching. I wouldn't have proposed this if he'd not say that he's mastering JS along with HTML/CSS.
It's also worth noting that each of those 3rd party services add technical debt on their own, plus they possibly cost something. They might make more sense if you have no technical understanding or really don't want to deal with all of this or if requirements get more complex and if you decide to add more fields, gather the data somewhere, etc.
Ray seems to be eager to learn new things, so why not encourage him to dig a bit deeper and have a slice of that "back end stuff" (in a relevant and clearly defined straight-forward scenario) and possibly save some money? Seems pretty empathetic to me ;)
I am a designer and managed to do this following a tut, it really isn't rocket science ;) He says he's mastering JS (from which I'm really far away), so presumably he doesn't fear to look into a few lines of PHP and modifying some entries here and there. Why should he have to deal with databases if he just wants a (simple?) contact from? There are lots and lots of tutorials which walk you through this, and if you don't want so spend the time to understand exactly how it works just copy/paste/edit (that's what I did a couple of times before, took me less than 1 hour to get things running).