the form assembly
Of all the things that are involved in making a website, the one and only task I loathe is building a form. I’m talking about a standards-compliant form that is as pretty as a form can be. I always forget all the tags: label, fieldset, etc. etc. So, wanting to speed things up when I needed to make a reservation form for a site we’re working on, I googled “standards compliant form generator” and hoped. And I found The Form Assembly, which is a breeze to use despite it being built in AJAX, which I’m trying to decide if I really like or if it is a solution in search of a problem. At any rate, here is the URL: http://www.formassembly.com/ At The Form Assembly, brainchild of Cédric Savarese, you can build as many forms as you like for free.
If you don’t want to worry about setting up form processing software and just need to compile the responses, you can set up an account where the form is processed on TFA website and results are posted in your account plus emailed to you. This is priced at 12 cents a response, which you buy in blocks of credit or pay a monthly fee.
Since I already have great form processing software from Will Bontrager, which also builds a database as well as sending out email, etc. (and I need a database for this particular application), I don’t need to subscribe. But I plan to give the subscription component a whirl on an upcoming website that doesn’t need a database.
TFA needs some more finishing—some “Under Construction” pages there and some of the Help is sparse, but it looks like it’s going to be a great site. It already saved me a couple of hours of mind-numbing markup.