Form Design Made Easy with Adobe FormsCentral

Form Design Made Easy with Adobe FormsCentral

via SitePoint Blogs » Design by Jennifer Farley on 2/19/11

Earlier this week, we looked at some examples of forms on Contact pages. In related news, Adobe this week announced the release of FormsCentral. It’s an online service for designing, distributing, collecting and analyzing data from HTML forms. You can create several different types of web forms and surveys including registration pages, contact forms, mailing lists and questionnaires. The forms are hosted by Adobe.

The form creator is an easy to use drag and drop set-up. When creating the forms you can add text, paragraph, single choice, multiple choice, date, drop-down options, and checkboxes. There are a number of templates available and it’s probably fair to say you won’t be blown away by the basic designs, but you can customize by adding your own images and setting up your own color schemes to beautify and enhance those dull web forms.

One major feature which is missing, however, is the ability to embed the form into your own site or blog. It would be nice to have the visitors fill in the form or survey on your own site rather than being brought to a separate page, but this will possibly be addressed in future updates.

Once your visitors have filled in the form, you can see the data in different ways with search and smart filtering. You can look at all the responses as a whole or look at individual replies as a record view. The returned data can be shared amongst colleagues and you can decide who accesses the data and what they can do with it. If you run an online survey you can view all responses in a table format or export the data to XLS, CSV and other formats. You can add additional columns and formulas to your response table to help you analyze your form data.

FormsCentral has three pricing levels:

• Free (one online form or survey and get up to 50 responses)
• Basic for $14.00/month (five forms or surveys 500 responses per form)
• Plus for $199/year (unlimited forms or surveys and 5,000 responses per form)

Have you tried other HTML form building services? Which ones would you recommend?