Wufoo | Building forms fast, easy, and free
Tim February 26th, 2007
One of the more difficult aspects of building a website is integrating forms, gathering the data submitted by them, and generating reports based on that information. Wufoo, a Y Combinator funded venture by Infinity Box Incorporated seeks to make the creation of forms including surveys and invitations a process that doesn’t require the need for scripting and HTML knowledge. In fact, the generated forms and reports can be built and viewed without ever writing a single piece of code.
Keeping with the general theme here at DemoMarks of “I’m too damn lazy to write code.” we’ve decided Wufoo could possibly fulfil all our needs for form-building applications, so we’re sampling their offerings today.
1. Build a form, Gather Information, Use it like a champ. Inspiring words that make me want to go conquer a nation. But for now I’ll simply sign up and test out Wufoo’s form-building service.
2. On the sign-up page I’m giving the option for different plans, both free and paid. There are 5 plans in all with varying levels of entry limits. All paid accounts have storage space and support with the top 3 paid plans offering SSL connections. There seems to be an option for everyone from the basic user to the Bonafied Businessman. For now I’ll be checking out the free plan so I choose that.
3. The sign-up is fairly simple with the only requirements being a full name, username, and email address. I also get the chance to choose a subdomain where I can access my forms.
4. After signing up I’m taken to the form manager where I’m greeted with the message to start creating forms. Yeah, sure, why not.
5. The Form Builder interface is extremely slick and offers pretty much every option for you might need for input from the user.
6. To add a field to the form simply click the appropriate field type on the left sidebar and the field will pop into view on the right. All of the editing here is done using AJAX calls so the loading is almost instantaneous and seamless.
7. To edit the title and details of your form click the Form Properties tab on the left hand side or click the Untitled Form box inside your form to edit it. Not only do you have the option of editing the Title and description as well as sending users confirmations but you can also choose a message to print onscreen upon successful submission or redirect to a URL of your choice.
8. I start inserting the rest of my fields. As you can see editing the fields is pretty straightforward, just click inside the field and the left sidebar will show all the details. The options available differ based on the type of field you are editing, so a drop-down menu will give you different options than a large text box will. You can also choose the make separate fields a requirement of form submission so users can’t leave them blank.
9. After only a few minutes of work we’ve got a survey that we can be quite proud of, so we go ahead and choose to save the form.
10. Our form is now saved and we can see it in our Form Manager window, along with some options to edit the form, view it, change the code (if you dare), and even applying a new theme to it.
11. I’m mostly interested in applying a custom theme to our survey so let’s see what Wufoo has to offer. I click the dropdown and choose “New Theme” and I’m sent to a Theme Builder that shows me a whole host of areas I can customize and a dynamic preview window for a standard form.
12. I’ve customized my form to my hearts content so I’ll go ahead save it. All I have to do is give it a title and I’ll be able to use my new theme from the form manager.
13. So now that I’ve built my form, customized the look, and applied that theme to my form, let’s take a look at the results of my 10 minutes of work:
That’s one spiffy looking form if I do say so myself. The ninja is a nice touch I added to remind people that when I say “Please give us your opinion” what I really mean is “I have a sword so play nice.”
14. Your form will also notify the user if any required fields were not filled in, or in my case, the field did not have the right type of information.
15. You’ve built your form but how will you notify users it’s available? Wufoo has the ability to send out mass emails with the URL of your form and a custom message.
16. Building and using a form is all fine and dandy but how are you supposed to view the information? Typically an online form will just email you a copy of the results or save it on a server for you to access. Wufoo takes it one step further and allows you to generate reports of your information including charts and graphs. You can also apply a theme to your report or download the generated reports to an Excel or CSV file.
Wufoo has managed to create a compelling product that takes the confusion out of form-building. Their free and paid plans offer many levels of service to meet the needs of a broad audience of users. They delivered on their promise to create a form without writing a piece of code and the final product looks clean, professional, and organized. If you are building a website and need to create a form, I would recommend giving Wufoo a go.
