I have signed up for a newsletter that only asked for my email address. After entering my address into the field then submitting, I was taken to a longer form but the email field was already filled in from the simple form they had on their homepage.

I have a sign-up form on one page but it takes up a lot of room. Is there any way to have the email address transfer from a mini form to the email field of the full form after a use clicks SUBMIT? that way they will be taken to the detailed form to actually complete the sign up

Yep,

Use server side code to catch, validate and redisplay the data. Or javascript and cookies could be used to transfer the information (potentially less reliable).

hmmm, im not sure this is doable for me then. My site is a hosted ecmmoerece site with network solutions. I dont think we can use server side codes. thanks a lot though. I will have to do some searching

an ecommerce site requires a server-side code, so you must be able to have one

Storing multi-page form contents in a cookie is not a good idea, since the cookie storage is limited (not sure, 4 KB or 8 KB). Furthermore you make your webform unavailable to people having disabled cookies for security reasons.

So it is better to use a formmailer capable of managing multi-page forms. By doing so, the formmailer takes over the job (usually by taking over the form contents from one page to the other stored in hidden form fields) and you can be sure that it works :-)

A multi-page formmailer is PowerForm, see http://www.sunnyscript.com/PerlCGI/PowerForm/ for details.

Sessions in PHP (server side scripting) is great opinion for storing form data and redistribute on site, but, it is very unsecure for username and password without salted hashing.