On good form

Adding forms to pages can be, quite frankly, a great pain.

First you have to sort out all your CGI settings, then the process of creating the form itself is a bit of a drag.

I’ve had several skirmishes with form making in the past, but I’ve now come up with a satisfactory paid-for solution which I’ll share with you by the end of this article.

First though, a look at a few alternatives.

Coding forms

The way I learned to make forms was in Dreamweaver, which has a fairly simple interface to create the look of the forms.

Working for a big organisation, I was lucky to have all the CGI stuff sorted out for me, so I didn’t have to engage with the nuts and bolts.

Here’s a good visual example of what’s involved … give it a little while to load, it gets there eventually, and it’s very clear.

However, you still have to sort the technical bit out … how the info gets from your form into a database or email … and that varies depending on who your hosting service is provided by.

It’s even harder if you want your form to be W3C compliant.

However, once it’s all set up, and if you’re only making a few forms, Dreamweaver is fine.

‘Off the peg’ solutions

If the ‘code it yourself’ option looks too complicated, there are many form solutions available online.

Most of them – if free – involve some level of advertising or sending a user away from your website, if only temporarily, and you may not wish to do that on a small business website.

It can look a bit amateurish if your forms are plastered with someone else’s adverts.

However, here’s a list of five sites that keep popping up whenever you look for a source of free online form generators, but there are many, many more available in addition to these:

http://wufoo.com/ … ‘helps you create contact forms, web surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code.‘ Pricing plans start free and go up to $199 per month.

http://www.freedback.com/ … ‘ Designed for people who want HTML forms without learning HTML. Try us out before you spend hours banging your head on your keyboard because you can’t get it to work. You have more important things to do with your time.’ Pricing plans start free and go up to $39 per month.

http://creator.zoho.com/explore/web-form-builder.html … ‘Zoho Creator’s easy to use Web Form Builder helps you quickly create web forms to suit your needs. All you have to do is just drag-and drop the required fields onto your web form. No Programming skills required!’ Free for personal use, from $5 per user for business use.

http://www.form2go.com/ … ‘Form2Go is easy to use Online Form Builder – 100% Secured Html Form maker.‘ Free 30 day trial, $25 per year after that.

http://www.mycontactform.com/ … ‘Our easy to use online wizard quickly builds the form for you. It will prompt you for all the information it needs in an easy step-by-step process. All you have to do is copy and paste the html we give you onto your site.’ Free with limits on number of forms created, or $29.99 per year.

My final solution?

I was after a form solution that’s:

- Free, but if not free, its price is capped

- Fully customisable

- Easy to create templated forms that can easily be adapted and reused when required, possibly many times.

- Offers the option of email and/or database responses

- Offers the option of including Paypal payments

The solution I’ve settled on for now, rightly or wrongly, is http://phpforms.net/ which I had to pay $99.95 for.

You get a load of stuff with the more expensive version, and in a moment of reckless abandon (!) I decided to splash out because I’d had enough of comparing the endless online/free versions and nothing else seemed to meet all my criteria.

One other thing about this software by the way. I had some problems with installation, but I got a great response from their customer services people and was very happy when they sorted out my difficulties.

phpForms – is an ideal solution for building and managing interactive web forms for your Web site. It sends form results to your e-mail box and/or stores them to the database. No programming needed, you just have to insert the automatically generated PHP or HTML form code into your page.

Looking forward to your comments...