2. Appearance – A contact form simply looks more professional than slapping your email address on a page.  You want your website to look as nice as possible, right?

3. User friendliness – Why make the user open their email client, cut and paste your email address, open a new message and compose an email?  Think how much more convenient it is for them to just fill out a form and hit “Submit”.  What if they’re not using their own computer, and they don’t have a web-based email account?  They’ll have to remember to visit your site again once they have access to their email account.

4. Accurate delivery – Your contact form can have a drop-down menu of all the departments in your organization.  The user chooses the department they want to contact and their email is sent there.  If you just list the email addresses of 30 departments or employees on your contact page, lazy users are going to email either the first address they see or maybe even all of the addresses on the list rather than search for the correct department or employee.

5. Convenience – With a form, you can control the subject line of the emails users send you, you can control the email address those emails are sent from.  You can store the emails you receive in a database in addition to receiving them via your email client.  All of this will make it easier for you to find specific emails, search them, gather statistics on your users and keep better track of who is contacting you and why.

So what’s your excuse for not having a contact form on your website?  Too difficult?  Not enough technical knowledge?  Well, I’ve created a video that shows how you can build a contact form and place it on your website in two minutes flat using a FormSpring form.  Watch below:

It’s as easy as that.  If you just sign up for an account with FormSpring, you can have a contact form on your site in a few minutes.  Let us know below if you have any comments or questions.Recent Posts:

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One of my favorite uses for FormSpring is throwing together a registration form for a conference or event.  As the popularity of Twitter continues to explode, I’ve noticed more event registration forms asking for attendee’s Twitter user names. If you are organizing and event, wouldn’t it be nice if you could automatically tweet every time someone registers for your event?

A site that provides such a service has just integrated with FormSpring. Tweetbrite now allows you to connect your FormSpring account to your Twitter account. Every time someone uses your Formspring event registration form, Tweetbrite can automatically tweet through your selected Twitter account. For example, “@johnsmith just registered for MBO 2009.”

To get started, just create a new FormSpring API key from your FormSpring account (tutorial). Then, head over to Tweetbrite.com, create a free account, and click the big “Get started” link once you log-in. A simple setup wizard will guide you through the steps to link your FormSpring account, your Twitter account and create your mashup. Another great feature provided through the use of the FormSpring API key is that you never have to reveal your FormSpring user name or password.

For those interested in details of the integration, the FormSpring API was very intuitive and easy to use. Once Tweetbrite is granted access to a user’s FormSpring account and a mashup has been created, selected FormSpring forms are checked regularly for new attendee data. Based on which form fields the user selected, Tweetbrite stores the new attendee’s first and last name and their Twitter user name. Another process tweets the new attendees in the format specified by the user and marks the attendee as having been tweeted (to prevent duplicate tweeting). I wish I could go into more detail about the integration, but the FormSpring API is really straightforward and the documentation is excellent.

Noah Coffey is a developer trapped inside a web designer. While spending his days enjoying the challenges of web and email design, his true passion lies in side projects developing unique and creative web apps in the social media space. He is also the co-founder of Blog Indiana, an annual blogging and social media conference located in Indianapolis, IN. Noah lives and works in Indianapolis, is married and a proud new fatherRecent Posts:

• Pre-Populating Embedded Form Fields From The Query String
• FormSpring Form Makes Fox 59 News
• Using Google Spreadsheets to Embed Form Data on Your Website

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I was born and raised in Kokomo, Indiana – “The City of Firsts” – or more affectionately known as “Stoplight City”. Not venturing too far from home, I attended Purdue University where I received my BA in Visual Communications Design. I worked my way down to Indianapolis in 2005 where I’ve spent my career as a designer and developing, testing and analyzing marketing programs. I’ll actually be taking on a bit of both roles here at FormSpring. When not in the office, you can find me cheering on the Colts and Boilermakers, enjoying the outdoors and training for 5K’s and half marathons.Recent Posts:

• New Multilingual Support Text On Forms
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• FormSpring Form Makes Fox 59 News

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When I am not in the office or at a networking event, you can find me spending time with my husband, taking a nice long walk or reading a good book.  On Sundays, you can find me in front of a television rooting for the Colts.Recent Posts:

• New Multilingual Support Text On Forms
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• New FormSpring Website Launches
• New features
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Surprisingly, when I check out some of the more popular LOLblogs, such as People of Wal-Mart, they’re still using the old “e-mail address on the contact page” method of letting people send them images for their website.  This just doesn’t seem efficient to me.  Besides the fact that making your e-mail public on a website opens you up to mountains of daily spam e-mails, submissions are likely to be lost as spam or simply to disorganization.

Funny image sites are all the rage these days and can be big money makers in addition to being entertaining time wasters (just look at the success of Cheezburger Network).  All you need to launch one is some time, a free copy of Wordpress and a FormSpring form to allow users to send you images and captions.

As proof of concept, I threw up a quick blog using a newer Internet meme that didn’t already have a blog dedicated to it, the “tenso” phenomenon.  Tenso is Porteguese for tense and started in Brazilian blogs and forums, but it’s starting to spread to the rest of the world.  It usually consists of a four panel photo cartoon that reveals a closeup of something you might not notice in the first frame, creating an effect of surprise.

From buying the domain at GoDaddy.com to posting my first tenso image, Tenso Blog took me about an hour to get up and running.  Besides Wordpress, the site is powered by two FormSpring forms.  One is a basic contact form and one is an image upload form.  Duplicating this concept and these forms, I could have a whole network of funny image blogs up in a few days.

Disclaimer: Tenso Blog is not affiliated with FormSpring in any way, it’s just a personal hobby project of mine.  The views reflected on the site are not those of FormSpring LLC.Recent Posts:

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We are waiting on more info from our data center, Peer 1, as to what exactly happened to cause the outage.  We will update this post when we have more to report.Recent Posts:

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• How To Embed Google Analytics Into Your Form

Once you have your Google Analytics or other tracking code that you want to insert, open your form in build mode and click on “Add Field”.  You will want to then choose “Description Area”.  In the description area field, you will see a link under “content” that says “use plain text editor”.  Click on this text to switch to plain text editor mode.  Now paste in your tracking code here and hit the “Save” button.

Your code has now been added to your form, although the field and code won’t visibly show up in the form builder or on the form.  You can switch the description area back to rich text if you like and add text to that field as you normally would, or you can leave it blank.  Either way, the code is now on your form and should begin tracking hits.

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We are excited to be a small part of this! You can learn more about the build at Hallmark’s website for the build, Hallmark Extreme. Coming later this month a deserving family will be chosen as the lucky recipient of a brand new home from Hallmark HomeRecent Posts:

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You can enable this feature by going to the Settings page for your form, choosing a new language from the drop-down menu on that page, and then clicking on “Save Settings”.

The actual text of your form will not be translated, as that is up to you. What we are translating includes the Submit, Next and Previous buttons; the supporting text on Name and Address fields; error messages and the default thank you message.

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<script type="text/javascript">

var form = “423214″; // replace this with your form’s id.
var viewkey = “aWhgE32sa3″ // replace this with your form’s viewkey.

// build the url
var url = “http://www.formspring.com/forms/js.php?form=”;
url += form;
url += “&viewkey=”;
url += viewkey;
url += “&style_version=2″;
url += location.search.replace(’?',’&’);

// create the script element.
var s = document.createElement(’script’);
s.setAttribute(’type’,'text/javascript’);
s.setAttribute(’src’, url);

// get the script’s ‘outer html’ and add it to the document.
var t = document.createElement(’div’);
t.appendChild(s);
document.write(t.innerHTML);

</script>

To use the above script, you will need to modify the ‘form’ and ‘viewkey’ variables so that they are set to the form you wish to embed (if you don’t know how to find your form’s id and viewkey values, please view the link above). Then, simply copy and paste this script into your HTML, just like you would the regular embed code.

After you embed the script, simply append data to the query string to ensure that the fields are pre-populating. For instance, if I have a name field on my form with the label ‘name’, I could pre-populate it by the following url:

http://www.example.com?name-first=foo&name-last=bar

In review, while pre-populating embedded forms with the default embed script is possible, it can be inflexible in certain situations. In these situations the above JavaScript can make the pre-population more dynamic by populating form fields from data in the query string.

Update: After I wrote this blog post, I discovered that this method no longer works in IE for most forms, due to how IE fetches and loads external JavaScript files. We recommend (and only support) the pre-population methods found here. If you do try and use the embed method outlined in this post, be sure to test in IE.
Recent Posts:

• New Multilingual Support Text On Forms
• FormSpring Form Makes Fox 59 News
• Using Google Spreadsheets to Embed Form Data on Your Website

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• Linking Vs. Embedding Vs. HTML
• User Profile: Vontoo: Automated Voice Messaging Solutions