One of the most criticized elements of a company’s website, large or small, is the lack of interactivity. Many organizations struggle with this, whether it means incorporating a simple “contact us” form, creating contests, or adding e-commerce to a site.
What Causes the Pain
Part of the problem, especially for small businesses, is the cost of having these elements created. While the advent of services like Wordpress have made creating a basic website a lot easier, once it gets to the point of integrating things that require interactivity, there is usually an element of manual coding involved.
Few small business owners have the time or desire to learn the skills required to incorporate forms and other interactive elements into their websites. This means that these features either get left off the website and an opportunity is missed, or the business owner hires out the development – which can be expensive.
How Formstack Heals the Pain
This is where Formstack enters the picture for small business owners operating with limited budgets. Formstack brings a level of simplicity to the creation of forms, almost making it on a par with writing an email. Yes, I am serious. I believe that if you are familiar enough with online services like Gmail or Yahoo mail you can use this tool without any training.
So what does it do? Formstack offers two services; one for the creation of forms, and the other for the creation of landing pages. Here, I’m going to cover the forms service.
Creating Forms for Your Website
You can start with a template, or use a blank page to create your own form. You can also import a form to use as a starting point from a website – even a website that isn’t your own (a great way to get a starting point for a form you can then customize).
The selection of pre-designed forms is great. These include things like surveys, course evaluations, job applications, event registration, mailing list sign-ups and more.
And deploying the forms to your website is simple, too. You either use the URL that is generated or a third-party plugins (WordPress has one).
This really is a great tool to use, and I can’t do it justice in these few paragraphs, so I encourage you to go and try it out for yourself.
Get 10% Off Formstack
The great people over at Formstack have extended a 10% discount to members of the Bonfire to use for either their forms or landing page service. If you are a member of the Small Business Bonfire (any level, including free membership), go to your Account Management page and click the link for “Member Discounts” to grab the discount code.
If you aren’t a Bonfire member yet, join today for free and you’ll get instant access to our member discounts and all of the other membership perks.
Image credit (browser): mterraza
Formstack logo and screenshot, copyright Formstack.
