123ContactForm blog

You probably know 123ContactForm, one of the best contact form generators. The news is that they started their own blog, because they want to interact better with the customers, and create tutorials about html forms easier.

Wufoo announces pagination

It seems that Wufoo is preparing a nice feature, pagination. Especially for big forms, this makes the form submission seem easier. I believe this requires a lot of modifications to their engine, so I can't wait to test the feature (after it is officially released to the public), but knowing Wufoo, it will work very well :)

Emailmeform...

I know EmailMeForm for a couple of years. At some point, I created an account with them, to see what their services have to offer. At that time, it was one of the best contact form generators out there. But time has passed, and they are not doing well in this hard competition. Wufoo has a lot of new features, FormSite also, 123ContactForm announces a couple of new features every month. And EmailMeForm, who has a new layout and a new owner, remains with the same old features...
Quite disapointing, I would say...

Formdesk is funny :)

Browsing the web, doing some research on contact forms, my hobby, I found (by a Google Ad) another form creator: Formdesk. Looking at their features and pricing, I found the "We create your form" link, in their menu. Curious young man as I am, I wanted to see how much would it cost if they create your form. The simplest form possible, 2 fields (Name and Email, for example), no calculations, no dependencies.


OMG OMG OMG! €200 for such a form ?! Indeed, Formdesk is funny :)

What every contact form should have

Nowadays, contact form generators can build complex contact forms, with tons of features, some of them useful, some of them just to be there when counting the features :) I thought it would be nice to make a list of the features that, in my opinion, must exist behind every contact form out there. So, here it is:

• data validation - how can you reply to a visitor that did not enter his email or telephone number correctly ?!
• anti-spam defence, captcha being the first choice - shall I explain why ? :)
• autoresponder - because it lets the form submitter know when you will answer, or whether you are on vacation or not. you can give your telephone number, so that the form submitter can call you if his problem is urgent

Of course, some forms require more complex features (file upload, Paypal integration etc), but I was talking about the normal contact forms.

123ContactForm.com now offers Paypal integration

Starting today, the forms created with 123ContactForm.com can benefit of a new feature: Paypal payment integration. This way, collecting money from the visitors becomes a piece of cake.

Subscription payments supported, various languages and currencies also supported. More details here. A nice presentation of this new feature in the video below...

Useless features for contact forms

We all agree contact forms are a powerful way of communication between the site owner and the visitors. This is why the site owners use contact forms with interesting features: file upload, field validation, multiple recipients, autoresponders, price calculations etc. But, in my opinion, there are some features that make the contact form hard to use, and sometimes make it totally unusable.

For example, in the contact form from the below image, you will see that the users can add tables to the contact form, increase and decrease the indent, and even use different headings. Who needs all of those, in the first contact between the visitor and the site owner? And if this is not enough, look what happened when I selected "Sub Heading"! Nice error, huh? Keep it simple, stupid.