Creating the survey application home page

It is now time to turn our attention to building some web pages for the survey application. The first page to consider is the home page, which will be the starting point for general users doing anything with surveys. Ultimately, we would likely plan for this page to have many different elements, such as a standard header and footer, also maybe a sidebar or two for news and feedback. We'd plan to develop comprehensive stylesheets to give the application a pretty and consistent appearance. But all of that is beside the point of what we want to focus on right now, which is the main content of the home page.

The primary function of the home page will be to provide a snapshot overview of the current state of surveys, and to provide links, where appropriate, to allow users to see details on individual surveys. The home page will show surveys grouped into three categories:

• First, there will be a list of currently open surveys. Each survey in this list will...