May 24, 2008
Website form generation can be a complicated procedure. Web forms need to be coded properly, and each field needs to be set with several attributes (maximum length, number of characters allowed, whether it’s required, etc.). Not are forms fairly complicated but actually making them work properly, on the server side, requires a lot of careful set up and testing. It’s easy to make a mistake and the cost can great. Imagine , after all the effort of web development, marketing a lead is lost because a website contact form wasn’t wired up correctly!
Leaving form creation up to a client is therefore a scary option. Too many mistakes can creep in. Yet, it’s often a website’s contact forms that are most desired to be created, added, or edited on the fly. They are after all a critical function of any website.
WuFoo is an online web service for web form creation and hosting. The hosting part is critical since many of the web form failures happen on the server side–sending important email contacts into Internet oblivion. With WuFoo you use their very simple interface to set up your form with all of the needed field types and and instructions. The form will run off their server, so all the backend scripting and server setting are taken care of for you. Once you finish a form you can either choose to post a link on your site over to WuFoo where the user can fill out the form, or more appropriately, an embed code can be generated and pasted into the web page so that the visitor can fill out the form on the original site (using an iframe). Of course the forms can be styled to match the look and feel of the site where they will be displayed. Their wysiwyg formatting tools are very easy to uses, and they also provide css inputs for more advanced formatting.
WuFoo offers a free option, allowing up to three forms and 100 entries per month. The free service does not allow you to redirect a form response page back to the site (it displays a “form by WuFoo page” instead). This makes the free option not very practical for any professional use, though it does allow you to kick the tires very effectively before buying. Their base paid option starts at $9.95 per month allowing up to ten forms and 500 entires per month (more than enough for most implentations). There are three more tiers leading up the the maximum $199.95 per month with unlimited forms and up to 100,000 entries per month.
I’m using WuFoo for the forms on this site. I’ve been very pleased with how easy it was to implement. Even though there are many WordPress forms plugins, they all still require some degree of configuration, validation and set up, not to mention the actual form creation. For the ease of use and implementation I choose to try out WuFoo and so far am very happy (I picked the $9.95 option).
WuFoo also offers custom form result reports. I haven’t played around with this feature yet, but it’s nice to see that feature available. If I encounter any specific problems, or other important features I’ll add a comment to this post. And please chime in if you’ve used WuFoo and have some feedback, or to report on other similar services and their differentiators.
