Whether you’re a web designer/developer (like me), a Church, School, Society, Club or have a personal blog; chances are at some point you’ll need to use a web form of some kind – be it a simple contact form, through to a survey, booking form or even a basic store.
Although I love being up to my elbows in HTML, forms have always had me hiding behind the desk! That was until I found the form building wonder that is Wufoo!
There are many online form building tools, but by far my favourite is Wufoo. It really has revolutionised the way I create forms and made it so much more speedy and painless.
Forms are created through a simple interface, you choose a field type, then add the label and any options for that field type and you’re away!
There are several basic field types such as single line, paragraph, checkboxes and dropdowns, etc. but there are many great ‘fancy pants’ fields for names, emails, address, numbers, money, dates and times (all of which have some clever options). There’s even a simple file upload field – nice!
Fields can be dragged around so you have easily change the order of the form fields.
The information submitted via Wufoo forms is can be emailed to you (as you’d expect) in a very customisable way if wanted (and it’s simple to create auto responders and allow users to send themselves a copy of the completed form). But the stored entries are also stored online (using SSL) where you can export entries in .CSV or .XLS formats. Wufoo also have a killer feature with form information – Reports.
Reports
With Wufoo’s Reports you can simply create charts and graphs from the results of all the results to questions. This is very handy if you’re building a survey. I recently needed to do this for a client and Wufoo made this so easy!
Forms
Forms can easily be broken into sections and pages and using Wufoo’s ‘Rules’ feature, you can build complex if/else elements and when to show/not to show fields with a few clicks!
Third-Party
Wufoo also integrates with many top third-party apps like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Twitter, adding to the nifty things you can do with the forms! (Such as adding a ‘sign up to our newsletter’ checkbox which auto sends the users details to MailChimp.)
And want to take money with a form – no problem! Wufoo works with Paypal (standard, pro and payflow), Google Checkout, Authorize.net, Stripe and more! Making it simple to take bookings, payments or even create a simple store!
Forms can be embedded using some JavaScript code or an iFrame. And if you’re a WordPress user there’s a nifty plugin allowing you to embed a form into post/page with a shortcode.
Forms can also be installed on Facebook pages. If you’re a real code junkie, the html/css for the form can be downloaded so you can use the code with your own scripts and database!
Design
The design of forms is done via the Wufoo theme builder, of you can create a completely custom form design using a link to a custom form css file.
Price
Now, the one thing that might put you off – it costs! There is a free option where you can have upto three forms and 100 entries per month. For more forms you’ll need a paid account. These range from $14.95 a month to $199.95 a month!
To take payments, you’ll need an account from the ‘Bona Fide’ ($29.95 a month). This is the package I use. It might seem quite a lot to pay for *just forms*. However, if you’re needing to deal with lots of forms, all the time, I think it’s worth every penny!
So if you’re in the need for a form, then give Wufoo a look – it really can make life easier!
Mickey says
Yeah, Wufoo is great! I just checked, and I have 131 forms in there so far… 🙂
James Cooper says
That’s a whole lotta forms! 🙂
Eric Dye says
Wow!
Brendan says
Wufoo is a sweet service. For our church, we tested a few services and decided to go with Formstack. The overall services were very similar, I think for us, the decision came down to a non-profit discount offered to us by Formstack…it was more affordable.
No matter the company, online form generators are such a huge help and well worth some monthly expense.
James Cooper says
Thanks for the tip Brendan – discounts are a good thing 😉