Online forms: as simple as clicking A, B, or C.
- Luke Telford
- 8 July 2009
If you've just left an email address under the ‘contact' tab, you can probably expect an inbox overflowing with tangled enquiries and orders, unformatted, vague and incredibly frustrating. Whether you need to establish something as simple as a mailing list, contact form or a customer survey, you'll need to take some active steps out of the dark ages of email and add a form or two to your site. Luckily for tech-troglodytes and the HTML-phobes out there, a number of incredibly simple services are available online for relatively cheap or free.
Most methods of form creation you find tend to be online services and offer the option of creating a free account with the motive of convincing you to sign up to their ‘professional' subscription package.
EmailMeForm
is one such site, offering HTML and
PHP forms for free, and with minimal programming knowledge required on the user's part. A modest subscription fee allows the use of web forms and various advanced features, although the site expressly indicates that it's services don't employ
encryption, meaning that forms aren't secure enough for sensitive information like credit cards details.
Freedback is a slightly more comprehensive site that
takes a simple and direct approach to form generation. It features a cut and paste HTML-based service that, as loudly exclaimed on it's homepage, requires no programming experience whatsoever. The free aspect of the site is fairly limited, however,
offering only one form with fairly limited functionality, but their pricing isn't astronomically expensive. Encryption is only offered with their ‘business' subscription, though, so the cheaper options would probably only be appropriate for contact
forms, mailing lists and invitations.
Wufoo is arguably the most professional of the web-based
options, and with a client list that includes Nielsen, Amazon and Twitter, it is priced accordingly. The cost is justified by proportionate increases in data storage and the presence of 128 bit SSL encryption in three of the four paying categories.
As with the other two web-based options, a limited ‘gratis' option is offered for users to see if the service is to their taste.
If the prospect of being tethered to a web-based service doesn't appeal, Minervity offers a five option run-down on how to embed forms into your website. The site details how to use a variety of code types (from HTML
through to AJAX and PHP), with free downloadable templates for each. Although the administration of the downloadable options does require a little bit of coding know-how, it's worth learning a few PHP and HTML basics simply for the purpose of using
these templates, as they are such good value for free.
And don't forget Google Docs makes it easy to publish a website form and link the
entries to a spreadsheet which you can edit and share online or download to your PC.
You see? It's simple to add forms to your site, with barely a line of code involved. #
