Building Forms with FormSpring
Today’s post comes from friend and Guest Blogger, Ade Olonoh:
If you do any work online, you’ve probably looked around for a tool to help you build online forms. If you’re a blogger, maybe it’s because you’re looking for something more advanced than you can get from a typical feedback form.
If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably found it to be a hassle to setup a form for collecting contest entries, or you’ve struggled trying to get some kind of value from the hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox that came as a result of a successful online campaign. Admit it: even if you’re an HTML expert, you hate the tedious work of building forms.
I want to introduce you to FormSpring, a great tool that lets users of any skill level easily build online forms, and helps you better manage the submissions you capture from customers. It was originally launched in early 2006, but released version 2.0 this week which includes a bunch of cool features that make it worth a close look.
The beauty of FormSpring is that you can setup an online contact form, survey, or registration form in just minutes without using any HTML or scripting code. You might be relieved to know that you can do it all yourself without ever having to call someone from IT.
Here’s a screenshot of the form builder screen — you build your form by dragging and dropping fields, and can preview what your form will look like in real time:
When you’re ready to use your form, you can copy and paste a link to send to your users, or grab one line of HTML code that you can embed in your blog or website. The great part about this is that you can completely integrate your form within your existing design, maintaining your brand.
You can watch submissions roll in via email notifications or an RSS feed. And once you’re ready to process the results you can download an Excel spreadsheet containing the submissions, or import that data into a database or CRM system.
The best thing is that you can create a free account that provides most of the functionality. If you’re looking for some heavy use, paid plans start at $5/month with no contracts or setup fees.
Try out the full demo, read more about all the features, or sign up for that free account.
I’ve has some troubles in the past with forms and getting all the information across hundreds and hundreds of emails. this sound like a great tool for my business. 5 dollars a month is nothing!
When I read the title, I thought it was a concept that a site would help someone create a form to use on their site. That got me excited, as there were several people I was going to send the link to, for their personal use.
For a business application, if I were going to use a service to create a form, I’d want it to create the form, the coding, and give me instructions on how to make it work on my site, using my server.
In business, once any information sits on servers other than your own, especially for forms — and contact forms?!?! ouch! — not a chance I would let it sit on another company’s server. If that company goes belly-up overnight (think of that recent VoIP company that shut off service on all its customers without warning), you lose everything.
No thanks. Five bucks a month isn’t much, but I have several hosting packages and the median cost of those packages is $19 per month. For that $19, I get six domain names free, over 300gigs of space, forms, and all kinds of other tools (most I don’t touch), and unlimited email aliases and 2,000 email addresses. Add another 1,000 for next to nothing.
Coding a form isn’t hard. Businesses, especially, should be leery about allowing anyone other than their own people have control of their its information. If the FormSpring server gets hacked, that company loses face with customers. Passing the buck and saying, “Our provider for the contact form did it …” is a poor excuse.
Thanks, but I will code my forms and make them bounce off my server.