Wufoo Blog

Neat, organized, simple, clear, understandable, scoped, engaging.

-- Neat and organized.

Messy and chaotic looking websites turn me off. Everyone has their idea of "style" but if it feels like I have to make effort to digest any kind of content, its a huge turn off. Being organized and tidy solves this problem more times than not.

-- Simple, Clear and Understandable.

Language is beautiful. Conveying concepts whether in words, pictures, video, etc, is hard. Websites that don't give a crap about the quality of their message turn me off, if they don't care, why should I?

-- Scoped.

I have mentioned how important scoping is in a couple of "review my website" posts. It has to do with how organization is displayed and sorted within your website. A nice example of proper scoping is stack overflow, and it takes tons of work. Stackoverflow has a "global" page where questions from all categories are sorted by votes, time, and responses. Drilling down into a specific tag or category narrows the scope of the information you see. All the filters and sorting work on a unified interface but only the scope changes. Lots of websites have scoping problems. Why are weirdo arbitrary global links/functions contained on a side navigation when I am in a particular subset of the site/data?

Headers, footers, left/right panels can all be designed to reflect proper scope. Maybe you want global stuff present everywhere. Well make the container clearly and consistently represent a global…

This is just for my personal website. It is mostly the SPAM. I started with the usual simple `contact.php` that emails me when someone fills the form. Then for the longest time, Wufoo[1] (a hosted service) took care of my contact form but I could no longer deal with the spam. I tried Formspree[2] as the free tier API works good enough for my personal use. Then stop dealing with it due to spam, again. I remember using Tally[3] but gave up and ended up with a `mailto:` and asking Cloudflare to obfuscate[4] the email for robots. I just no longer deal with forms, or comments on my website -- just that -- a personal choice.

Forms are the de-facto use cases for any web property. It looks and functions simple but someone has to maintain it and keep up-keeping it. It is no longer simple.

1. https://www.wufoo.com

2. https://formspree.io

3. https://tally.so

4. https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/scrape-shield/email-address-obfuscation/

37signals made a bad decision with this, in my opinion. They don't emphasize the expensive packages first, to make the cheaper packages seem more affordable. They make the one you want huge, and the 49 dollar price, at first glance, seems expensive. If they emphasized or drew your eye to the $149 package first, by the time you get to the package you want, at 1/3rd the cost you were looking at before, you'd be more inclined to feel it is a good deal.

Look at WuFoo's design, they do an incredibly great job at the price chart, and they can back up their decisions with data.

http://wufoo.com/signup/

On the other hand, if your service is not something you're trying to upsell people on based on gimmicky features, I strongly suggest following the Slicehost model: http://www.slicehost.com/ They know you know what you need, so they very plainly list all of the plans and their prices with no gimmicky sales bullshit. I love them for that.

Also, I admit I've been a little sloppy on some of privacy policies and such. I'm not out defrauding anybody. first I haven't sold any leads because I can't sell. that's been the problem. Also, bid2mow.com works with SSL. I missed that I need to redirect the link from http to https. I'm working on this stuff in my spare time. I'm just trying to figure out a cost per lead to even see if there is a business there. All this is market research not actual businesses. As for 1millioncoins.com again market research survey to see if there is anything there. If I could afford a lawyer I wouldn't be trying to start a side bushiness.

Also, I think wuffo.com is using ssl:
https://www.wufoo.com/2013/10/09/making-wufoo-more-secure-https/

You're right in that creating a a form in Wufoo is only the beginning. At that point, you can start sharing the link to the form or embedding it on a web page to start collecting data, leads or even payments. You can do all this from our Code Manager: http://wufoo.com/docs/code-manager/

Built into every form is also the ability to subscribe to the incoming data in real time to your email inbox, mobile device via SMS or your RSS Newsreader.

We also have a robust report building feature that can help you visualize and export your data so you can better understand the information you've collected.

You can learn more about all these different steps in our other video tutorials at http://wufoo.com/docs/getting-started/

If you just need to get some data - maybe use something like this:

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/87809?hl=en

http://www.wufoo.com/

If you want to develop it all yourself, you'll need someplace for the submitted form data to go. This means building some software that resides on a server ... so you'll want to learn Ruby or Python or PHP or something like that to process the submitted data.

There's lots of online educational resources. Maybe check out http://www.codecademy.com/ where they'll step you through the basics of building a webpage.