Form options for static websites

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the No Script Show. This is part of our series looking at components that make up a website. And today we're talking about forms. Forms turn the web from a passive medium into something dynamic and interactive. Without forms, users can't search, comment, access, private content, or shop online.

As it is such a huge topic, and the aim of this show is to keep things simple. We're gonna start with an overview. When we might need forms and what services are available to help us.

For static sites like ours, the no script show, we certainly need additional services to add forms, but this episode should also be as relevant to those on dynamic platforms like WordPress.

As always, if you head to our website, you'll be able to find the show notes. This time, there are no script show forward slash 25.

And just a quick message, if you like, what we do over here, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. My understanding is that if you do that, you'll be notified by YouTube when we create content and that will help us out no end. So and subscribe, they say, David, I understand. Okay, over to you.

[00:01:11] David Waumsley: Yeah. I had some trouble trying to, put together something on forms because, it's just such a huge topic Yeah. As you've mentioned. And, so I decided this overview might be a good thing because, a couple of things I guess happen with me.

One is that, I've been moving towards static sites and our own society is static, If we want anything dynamic with a server, then we have to employ a service for that. And we have got a contact form which needs fixing, on our site. But also, I've had clients as well who I've put onto static sites who need to then manage some more complex forms.

So I needed to start, and my assumption was, I know there's been a big, huge move. I. Think it was the Web Almanac, for last year, 2024 that said that in the top, I think it was 10,000 sites, there's been a 67% increase in the number of static and hybrid sites. Wow. Yeah, I know. So when I was first moving that direction, when I looked around, maybe it's just me bad at searching.

There wasn't much available in terms of form solutions now. And of course looking now, and I think this has been reflected since to be so many of them around. Yeah. In different forms. So I thought we'd look at those. And what other thing did I want to mention, I should say? I think we'll break this up, so we'll talk about this, but in.

A later episode, I think we'll need to do a video bit of content. Okay. Where we'll look at some of the form solutions. 'cause we'll need to explore how they look and how they behave. Yeah. and then we've got other things that we'll need to do as well for the show, which is, at some point, I think it's its own topic, is to look at search, search options for static and also look at commenting systems.

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, it it's freaky when you think about it that essentially. There's no interactivity on the web without forms, basically. I know that with things like JavaScript, we can move things around and what have you, but anything, or you want to submit something so that isn't just limited to the typical use of content forms, every time you go put something on, I don't know, blue Sky or Master On or X or Facebook or whatever it may be.

Basically interacting with a bunch of forms. It feels like half the web became forms when social media came along. You wanted to communicate with other people and the only way to do that was with forms. So very important, not just for contact forms, but the wider web as well. Shall I pop the show notes onto the screen?

Yeah, that would be lovely. Okie

[00:03:39] David Waumsley: do

[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: also, 'cause I'm going all white as well. Yes, it's very sunny where you are. You've definitely been illuminated. Fear not, you're only a small circle on the screen now, so it's not so important.

[00:03:51] David Waumsley: okay, so yes, show notes. Let me just get my mouse over them here. So I thought we'd just start by talking a little bit about when it comes to forms, expectations and clients.

That sort of is my title here, because we're in an era where, you know. So all know code products are being heavily marketed. So certainly my experience is that the clients I now get, they think that getting any kind of interactivity is a pretty easy thing, something that they'll be able to manage themselves and it doesn't always prove to be that way.

and a lot of clients that I've had have actually come to me for. literally a form really. A couple of people have come just for a, booking thing. they've seen that, they've had rooms that they've got for hire as part of their practice or something, and they want to hire them out.

And that's the main reason they've come to me is because they want someone to make this form magic happen.

[00:04:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay?

[00:04:50] David Waumsley: so I dunno how much you've experienced this, but that my feeling is that there's a real sense that. With a lot of clients who are not that familiar with the web, it's that they see the, our forms out there and they think it's a case of build it and they will come Oh, in, in other ways.

So the form just having a form up there for bookings, then bookings will come because it's, yeah,

[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: this is What I, my experience was back in the day when I was doing client websites, was that exactly that you put on a form and the expectation would be that it would arrive, and often you'd get into conversations about, the, deluge of things and how they would manage it.

And in the end, you. You just had to silently and in some circuitous way say, I wouldn't worry too much. It's highly unlikely that it's gonna be, hammering your inbox all the time. Then again, you never know if you, if you suddenly go viral somewhere on the web, maybe the form will become the thing that brings your site to its knees.

Who knows? But, yeah, this whole thing of build it and they will come maybe. Yeah.

[00:05:53] David Waumsley: And I know, I'm one client who I really but it was, it's taken me so long to convince her because she says, a competitor down the road doing so well from their bookings form. But I said, but it, but they are, but it wasn't that.

It's because they put so much extra work into making themselves visible. on the ground advertising, the reason

[00:06:13] Nathan Wrigley: the form is getting filled is 'cause of all the other things that person is doing, which obviously dunno. Having said that, I am working with a friend of mine on a WordPress product at the moment, and we've made extensive use of a WordPress form solution for the support.

Which we anticipate, and it's not really a case of build it and they will come. In our case, we're trying to work out ways to prevent people filling in the form unnecessarily, if So we're putting all these different roadblocks in to say, have you tried this? Can you try this?

blah, blah, blah. I dunno how successful that will be. But certainly we're, trying different ways on the assumption that we really don't want people filling out the form too often, if

[00:06:56] David Waumsley: Then another thing that I think, some clients think is that, if they do have a sort of solution, for forms that they'll just be able to manage it, it'll just take care of itself.

And because I'm doing the static side and I now really, I think it's quite important for me to give the dynamic stuff over to the client so they can control that. So it can separate what I've built for them against other services. but there's a real, the same client who wanted the booking forms, it's become very clear over finding lots and lots of solutions for her that she wouldn't be able to manage it anyway.

She's just hates computers. She's just not, she wouldn't be able to manage to do the things, to change the appointments as needed or to cancel, to get back just to, to run it. So it, it was a good thing that we never. Built it and spent all this money, because I don't think there was a solution out there.

So

[00:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's this beguiling idea that you can offload stuff to the internet, and the internet will magically do these things. I don't know, for, in the case of booking. The idea would be that, everybody's on their phones all the time, so if I put a booking form up there, my calendar will suddenly become full.

they've gotta find the page to start with, and then the form's got to be not that confusing. And honestly, I am more and more getting to just gimme the phone number, just, and we'll get into that in a bit. But if I can find the phone number and talk to a human being, I will, try to miss out forms as much as possible just 'cause I know that I've then spoken to a person and that thing has been dealt with and I've booked the thing at 4:00 PM on Friday and now everybody knows that's happening and it's guaranteed.

Whereas with the, I don't know the online bit, I'm a little bit more, I dunno, I've been let down by people misunderstanding how their own technology works, let's put it that way.

[00:08:43] David Waumsley: Yeah, and there's another client as well that, that's what came up recently. I was looking for something where they can manage it because I've allowed them to use one of my accounts that I've got for form.

And this form needs to, they've got events and people need to pick an event and then, pay for that, which goes through to Stripe. And I'm using one of the solutions which we'll talk about later, but. What I realized is that I let 'em use my account to do that and they add access to it, but actually it really confused them anyway because it's got these conditional logics in it.

Yeah. So it's not that easy for them to work out. So I still had to go in and

[00:09:14] Nathan Wrigley: sort that out. So figure it all out for them. Yeah, they can get very complicated. very quickly. So what, on the front end might appear really obvious? you've ticked a box and then a bunch more fields become visible.

The, logic behind that can get infuriating. Pretty quickly. Yeah,

[00:09:31] David Waumsley: so I, and I've just listed a few things which, which will be typical for this show to mention, but, what clients are less likely to think about is UX and accessibility of the forms that they're gonna use, whether they're responsive to today's devices, where it needs to be fully responsive really, isn't it?

We can't just go to standard sizes. the impact that the form solution has, on. Page load and in turn, SEO and the potential cost of support, maintenance for the forms that they might want on their site. So I think, yeah, that is generally not considered when a client comes. And I think, yeah,

[00:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: and may the, maybe the subscription model as well, they've got to pay the yes of that, for, having a plan on whatever service that is as well.

You've done a lot of work with, ai, I think, to draw out some of that, which we'll get to later.

[00:10:22] David Waumsley: Yes, exactly. I think, certainly I did that when you've got a client in the early days and that you are just keen to give them what they asked for, so you'll rush off straight away to get something that, we can't build.

'cause we're not, back and front end developers, who can do everything. so we're gonna look for a solution and then often without probing enough, it's, Very easy, I think, to end up providing a solution that the client really can't manage themselves and haven't really thought about and may not be needed in the first place.

Yeah. that's what's happened with the people who came to me for bookings. They've actually never had a bookings. That's what they came to before, and they've been talked out a bit because what they needed more than anything was somebody to come to a website they owned, That was the first hurdle.

[00:11:10] Nathan Wrigley: Get them. Yeah. the booking form will not be viewed. Yes. By anybody. So it's pointless. But there is this sort of beguiling nature. It's the whole build it and they will come thing as well in overcomplicating what you've got. Yeah. so as the purveyor, I don't know, let's say that you've got a hair, a hairdressers or something like that.

You, you provide 50 different options and you wanna know exactly what they want and what time they wanna come. And ada rah, before you know it, the form takes 10 minutes to fill out. And actually all you needed was date time. And your name and that's it. that's really all that you needed, but you overcomplicate it because you can.

Okay. Do all websites need a form? Is that where you're going to now? Yes,

[00:11:55] David Waumsley: I think so. Because this is a ongoing debate because I think you see it somewhere maybe on Reddit, every year, I think you say, do you still need forms on your basically small business sites? The sort of brochure sites as people say in 2003, four, five, it keeps going on the debate.

And, so I thought we'd just, I've summarized basically what I've seen in all of these debates. The, can I just

[00:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: interrupt you there? Sorry. because what you're about to say, if it's true, I never knew. Any of this. Okay. And it's so interesting 'cause I, my answer to that question would invariably be yes, it can't hurt.

You might as well have a contact form, but what you've discovered here, again, caveats if it's true, and let's hope it is that, I'm so wrong. I was so wrong about that. So sorry I'm interrupting, but I just thought it was an important metric. Keep keep. watching. No, I

[00:12:51] David Waumsley: think that's interesting. Your, I would've, I think I would've said the same, but now I question it a lot more.

one reason I question it is because, I'm keen to promote the indie web, the fact that people can just manage their own H ml and CSS and keep it as simple as possible. And as soon as you get into forms. Then in some form or another they're onto dynamic servers and that makes the whole thing more complex.

So if you can just use third parties and avoid the form, then that's great. And also, forms are such a, one of the things that I've been doing, which we'll talk about later, is I've been really jenning up on how to make a good form. I've been reading a book by Adam Silver, who's, on, as well as some other people on accessibility and forms get really complex to do them right.

so Can we avoid them all together? yeah, the debates are going on. I suppose it's no different from, is SEO dead in whichever year? it's the same sort of thing. But, yeah, I'm thinking about just the contact forms with this really on the sort of personal and small business sites.

That might be the only dynamic thing they need on the site. If you put a form and do they actually need it? So the people for adding a form will generally say it avoids the spam of a public email. It lets you. Collect, structured, structured and required information, you can route messages to multiple or specific recipients automatically.

It makes it easy to automate leads to, CRM or databases or whatever you use there. Standard subject lines is something that you can control with that one. Making inquiries easier to manage. It keeps the user on the site rather open A email client or something like that.

[00:14:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:14:35] David Waumsley: And you can log and analyze the submissions for tracking and insights.

So that's the fours and they

[00:14:41] Nathan Wrigley: all make perfect sense. None of that is weird. And, I think I was, I would've said all of those things without thinking about any. Of this stuff, which is about to come. Yeah. Yeah. And especially the additional points. So anyway, sorry, carry on.

[00:14:55] David Waumsley: Yeah, no. I'll do the gates list that I've got here.

Forms can still attract, spam anyway, so you need a proper capture. So you've got another third party in there or some form of filtering, so that's another service you rely on. users may find forms restrictive compared to writing a direct to email, so they might not wanna just follow that message, but they might, I dunno, they might, Want to add more than your form allows. Accessibility might suffer if the form's not properly coded, which in most cases it's not. misconfigured forms may fail to deliver messages. It requires technical setup and ongoing maintenance. With these things, of course, and a. Even with the services I've had, we've had flaws.

So you introduce that there's a risk of poor design, creating a confusing or frustrating user experience server or plugin vulnerabilities could open up security risks. Meeting GDPR requirements is more complex if you've got form 'cause you have to highlight what's going through that way. And and also if you make your forms too long or, intrusive visitors may abandon them.

And I got some extra points to try and Balance these out. So this is the fascinating bit. This is the bit that I just

[00:16:07] Nathan Wrigley: didn't know, and I'm so curious about this. Go on.

[00:16:10] David Waumsley: Yes. I think everything I say has gotta be taken with a pinch of salt because some of it has been generated by perplexity ai, and amalgamated some of these statistics.

So bear that in mind. Okay. Let's just

[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: put all of that to one side and assume that AI never hallucinates about people and all of this is true. I'm sure there's a kernel of truth in every one bit of this, okay.

[00:16:32] David Waumsley: Carry on. Okay. there's definitely a case that many, UX experts, and I've actually put link to the, Norman Niland group or the Neil Nielsen Norman Group.

We never remember to, but anyway, whether they're talking about the, email being a, key trust factor, so one of those four was the fact that you can obscure your email address and just use a form so you don't get that spam. But to be honest, if you do that, it's quite a key trust factor. People want to see an email address anyway, so that's gone for one of the four.

And then there's some, there is amalgamation from publicity of the studies, so there's they, and I've seen this in a few places actually, that the forms themselves, and of course it depends what the situation is, but the form itself only converts at about three to 5%. These sort of surveys that are shown, which is not very high, is it?

And when you look at clickable emails and phone numbers, they can be converting up to 38%. Of course, context is all important that with this. But, website chat, I think a lot of these studies are presented by people who have a product, a website chat widget. Yes. But they come from something like 33 to 50% and then.

Also WhatsApp. And I think, there's obviously people who want to promote that. Those, message links that you can get where you can click open to chat through that, they can achieve rates of somewhere between 45 and 60%. That seems very extreme and I'm not sure if I believe that, but it's just interesting when you look at it, when you get, I asked it in a few different questions actually for ai, and I got something very similar, which really put the form, the contact form much lower than all these other.

methods of context, so do we need it? And there was a few other things that, I found out as well, from a few different places that phone numbers, fields can drop, submissions. So if you are adding that one, even if it's optional, just someone seeing, particularly the youth as we were talking about earlier, if they see a phone number being required or, looks like one's being asked for, that will put them off.

so

[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: interesting. Anyway, sorry, you finished the bullet points and then we'll go into, oh

[00:18:41] David Waumsley: yeah, there's only one more, which is just there was no research. I was looking for research to see whether I thought disabled users for accessibility, whether they would generally prefer to click on an email with a familiar system that they use or over a form.

And of course, obviously a non-accessible form. The email's going to be better for them, but there's no real research into which people prefer. There's just generally a lot of people. May prefer what they're familiar with, so they would probably go for the email clickable link rather than the form.

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: There's so much interesting stuff in that, so I'm just gonna pause it in the way that I see. So first of all, that the, again, let's just assume it's true, if it's wildly inaccurate, apologies. But the low conversion of, forms. Somewhere in the region of 5%, let's go with that, is amazingly low.

if you present that 20 times, one person will fill it out or less in this case. So that's remarkable. But also the, clickable email and phone number converting somewhere in the region of 35 to 40%. That's also curious, but that really does jive with me because if I see the phone number.

Okay, so first of all, let's assume it's like some local business. I'm gonna ring that a hundred times out of a hundred. I'm not gonna fill out the form if it's possible for me to speak with that person. I've decided years ago that's the best way to conduct almost any negotiation is to speak to the person.

So I don't know if it's a plumber. I just wanna know when don't you come in. Let's get it all sorted out. I'll talk to you, we'll establish trust. You can figure out who I am and I'll tell you where I live and, I'll get all of the details out. And it's because of that conversation, it's because something surprising will inevitably come up.

And I, wanna know that I've given all the detail in all of its fine, gory detail, whatever that may be. And I've also decided, that I can get a across in one minute, probably what it would take me 20 minutes to write out in an email. So that whole phone number thing is brilliant. Second email.

Yeah, I'm all about that as well because it's this, I can put all of it down. I'm not constrained to a field. you've gotta say all the thing, you've gotta list the things here. What's the reason, what have you I just wanna explain the reason in this one big email, text box area, if you like.

And so that works for me. I'm, not so sure in, my case. This statistic about WhatsApp and website chat. That doesn't ring true for me. But obviously, the why I, try not to use those things. If, possible, if they're there, I will use them. Not if it's a bot. As soon as I get the notion that it's a bot, my first thing is can I speak to a human?

I just type that in and see what happens. so those kind of don't work for me. But that's the one about the, if you just put a form field asking for a phone number, that just, that it drops submissions That's so curious to me. Because I can get that as well. I don't wanna give my phone number up as a part of this exchange, and I don't know if you do the same thing.

I often put a incorrect phone number in if it's required. I'll just make up some random phone number which satisfies the length of digits. But I don't wanna give some random person my phone number because I don't know where that's gonna end up. Yes. and yeah, and then obviously the, the bit about, disabled users and what have you at the end.

So all of that to me is basically extraordinarily fascinating. And the whole chat bot thing and the clickable email and phone, I hadn't given that any thought at all. But it would definitely skew my advice to somebody going forward, depending on their need. if it was a local business website, I think that's telling me, promote the phone number more or less, above almost anything else.

[00:22:39] David Waumsley: Yeah, it's, it's interesting 'cause, context is gonna be important, how these are designed. I, do believe the loan number on the contact forms because of the fact that I've seen. Roughly, with some statistics, how many people have gone to a contact form but not filled that in? Yeah. So that doesn't surprise me that it's so low because they've gone to that page a lot, but very few submissions come from it.

but the other numbers which are saying how high the high numbers are, the ones that I don't trust so much.

[00:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: So interestingly as well, I think the device that you are visiting that page on will really be critical. So I'm far more likely to fill out a form if I'm sat. With a keyboard Yes. On the phone because of the pain of, typing anything into a.

Form field on a phone that probably, it is probably part of it. And as more and more of us are viewing more and more of the web online with a mobile device in our hand, that probably skews us away from it. I do wonder if Form Fields had an audio option where you could, click a button, record some audio and send that a lot, I wonder how that would, work.

Never really thought about that. You can do that.

[00:23:49] David Waumsley: Anyway, it was just, most of this, it was just me thinking, do I need to put a form on everybody's site? And I will just mention just on the WhatsApp, which I hadn't really thought about before, but because people are so used to that as a way of contact and the way of being able to share imagery, it very useful for where I've put it on, electrician site on that, because.

What he's saying is that, people often want to show him a picture of what needs fixing.

[00:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, I have done this, so I have a, I use a plumber and, w we know we've known each other for many years now, but that is the modus operandi that he has. And so I'll explain that something is broken.

Yes. And it needs to be replaced. And so the immediate thing is can you show me a photo of the bit that's broken and that must make his life in immeasurably more straightforward? 'cause immediately he's captured, okay, I know what that job involves now. Whereas before he'd have to show up, then probably go and get the part that.

Demonstrated was needed. So there's two journeys there. Whereas the photo, the photography bit there probably cuts that out. So yeah, that's really interesting. Really interesting. Yeah,

[00:24:58] David Waumsley: it's just made me think a little bit about what I think I've come to the conclusion that, and interesting enough, I was talking to Paul Lacey, who's been a guest on the show and is a good friend of ours, and at the moment he's doing some designs for the.

Page builder that he does some occasional work for. He is doing some, pages and I looked at his contact page and I thought, although were quite well thought out, he's got different ones. And that contact pages as the Nielsen Norman Group or Norman Nielsen Group say about contact pages. It should have all the sort of things that you might need if you're going to make contact in any form.

parking and where they are on the map and all that needs to be included. But on his, and that he made very clear is. Telephone numbers, a sort of little box that was very clear and what needed to know about telephone and what you needed to know about the email. And then the contact form followed later and I thought that layout, just the design of it, seemed to be perfect for this.

So I put it, but I think, you could easily skip the contact form on some sites and not, I asked the AI in various forms, the question, do you think, given these bits of information here, whether, a contact form would lose, not having a contact form would lose you any business. And they generally came out to the fact that they didn't think it would make much difference.

And in fact, another argument would be that you can overload people with too many options and then lose people that way. Yeah. And also it means that you've

[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: got to man several options, haven't you? So if you present a phone number. And an email address and a contact form, and I don't know, WhatsApp as well.

There's four places where you've got to be visible. Whereas if you, put it down, I guess the contact form provides convenience, especially on the side of the business that's got the website, because they just have to man that inbox, don't, they just have to keep an eye on that form and, yeah. The kind of data that they're gonna get is predictable.

So it's definitely got its benefits. but I always went with the, the options on the Contact us page. I would, always list out phone number, address and things like that, but I, didn't apply the amount of thought that. Paul obviously has some in this scenario, but that's interesting.

[00:27:04] David Waumsley: Yeah.

Sort of laid out in a way where it's not just a bit of text, which you'll skip over and then see the big form, which

[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:10] David Waumsley: Is the eye. Most is actually made the telephone and the email capture eye more than the form the forms. Okay. Secondary and I thought that's probably how I'll do it with most of my type of clients.

obviously. But some people, they need, there are circumstances with people where they do need to collect that into Yeah. a system, Yeah. Google sheets or something. So a form is needed. yeah. Okay. So, let's, assume, ah, we need a form of some kind. Yeah. Let's assume that, shall we?

Okay. form options. So I put some stuff here 'cause I needed to get this straight in my own head. let's start with some sort of basic facts. that in order to be able to send some data via a form on our website safely, we do need a client and a server side. Working. We need that sort of dynamic server on there.

So I've, I might as well read the notes out. So the client side is, for anyone who's not familiar with that, is the kind of HTML that the user interacts with. And we can think of this, I like this analogy. I, somebody else gave me this one that we can think of that as the sort of bouncer on the front door of a nightclub, but it's doing the basic, yeah, it does the basic checks.

And if we're creating our own forms, then it's up to us to make sure that people know when they've made a mistake before they. Click the Submit Sore out there doing those sort of safety checks, but they're just basic ones. And then the server side, acts as, the security in the club, guard in the VIP service.

So it is gonna check whether the data is safe to send onto your email and whether it stops, some of the riffraff getting into that special area. So that's the spam, that's, we need to connect the anti-spam, we need to connect that to some sort of server in between. Be right. So I like it.

I quite, yeah, I like the analogy. The, most interesting thing for me though, is what I've learned, and we'll talk about this in another episode, is that even though HDML form validation comes built in, it's probably not good enough to say it's fully accessible for everybody. okay. 'cause it's not going to read out without using RVO and JavaScript.

It's not going to tell somebody necessarily. When they've done it in real time or point them when they need to go, if they need to, Correct. An email address or something. So

[00:29:27] Nathan Wrigley: do you know if that's an endeavor of let's say, browser manufacturers to make

[00:29:32] David Waumsley: the,

oh gosh. The service stuff? Yeah.

we, didn't get it until H ML five, although that's very old now. We didn't have that and we needed JavaScript. there has been that move, but I don't see, there's much that's changed to alter and make forms easier. Basic, contact forms, I think, because the majority of people only need that.

And I think, yeah. Yeah, because I think. It will correct you automatically if you're do nothing with the html. It will correct you to say you haven't put an AT sign in your email, but I don't think it pulls you out if you, yeah, if you've left the dot out from, dot com or whatever your email address end is.

Yeah. I don't think it'll call you out, so it does allow you to. Anyway, it's for another time, but I think when we get to, yeah, this one. Okay. Yeah, Sorry, derailing. So yeah, so our options are, firstly is to either DIY, the server and the client side. So we write the front end code and the backend code, but we're not going to do this 'cause this is really going to mean that we have to host this.

Backend server. So we can do that either, with serverless cloud functions we have these days, we have more choices. We could do it with static host plus their own backend APIs. We could do it with, email to form submissions via mail server, or we can use some of these new open source, server softwares to be able to manage this stuff.

But that's way beyond me. Certainly. I think it is for you Nathan, as well. yeah.

Yep,

Yeah, I think you are better at this kind of stuff than I would be, but anyway, I'm not touching that. The next option then is to go where we've gone with our, 'cause we have got a contact form. It's not very good. that's on our site.

And, that's used the next option, which is DIY, the client side. So I've put the HTML in there. And we use a third party for the server side. And if that's the route that we want to go with this one, then there's a load of services, which, for those who are listening to this, won't be able to see.

But if you go to our show notes, you'll see there's a big, table here. We are basically ones that fit into that category. So both you and I, Nathan, we bought, didn't we? Form Spark, and that's the one I've been using.

[00:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So this is a, it doesn't do any building of the form. You have to build the form yourself.

you have to either write the HTML with the form fields and the submit button and whatnot, and then you connect the submit event to their. I, can't remember how it works. You basically copy and paste some endpoint, don't you? And that data then gets sent to Forms Spa. It worked pretty well.

it did, everything. Obviously it's not check, it's not sanitizing things, it's not checking for errors and what have you. But the, submissions once. The end point had received it did what it said it would do, which would be forward it on to. Yes. But it it was technical. Not tremendously technical, but there was a little bit of a learning cover.

I certainly wouldn't have thought a client would like to be involved in any of this process. Yeah, definitely the sort of developer's job, but it worked. It was fine. And it was cheap as chips. Yeah. Still going I guess. 'cause I've stopped using it. Yes, it's still

[00:32:34] David Waumsley: going. Yep. from personal experience, I, you're not gonna get much support from that.

this is a one-off, it gives you 50,000 lifetime submissions for this fee of, 20, $5. And that just lasts as long as it needs to us. And on my deal that we got the same as you, I think, where it keeps adding each month. 'cause it was a slightly different deal, which we got there. So I'm never gonna run out of forms there.

My only beef with that particular thing is that once I, contacted them through support and never got an answer, the second time I did it, I did get an answer, but they never resolved it. And that was the fact that in India on my, IP address, which is actually, the state, Broadband service.

I couldn't submit. It wouldn't go to them. It failed, and it's constantly failed. They had to put a VPN on to make it work. Now, I'm not worried about that because I don't think the couple of clients who are using that at the moment are gonna lose anybody because, but we could be, because Yeah, that's

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: not a great thing though, is it?

And especially, no, if the support, 'cause obviously you, they're obviously doing an IP. They've obviously got some IP blocking somewhere in there and who knows.

[00:33:45] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I think they bounce off other people's services as well, don't they? To Yeah. Send these things. I dunno what that was about, but otherwise it's worked pretty perfectly for me.

but the rest of them are all the same. there's one called Basin, I think the well-known one, I'll just skip down the chart, was, forms Spree, I think is one of the earlier ones, meeting that new demand for static sites. And 50

[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: submissions a month on Forms spree for free, and then you're onto their paid tm.

Yeah,

[00:34:15] David Waumsley: to be honest, there's nothing, I won't list them all. maybe I should, I list them all out for, I'll just say 'em.

[00:34:20] Nathan Wrigley: Shall I just read 'em all out loud? So you've got forms Spark Basin. There's a common pattern here. By the way, they all have ingeniously titled names. form spark basin form, bold form, backend form, zillion web, three forms, form spree form carry.

And form keep, if I was in the SAO business, I think, I think there'd be some conversation to be had here. but there's loads of them. Yes. And I bet there's loads that you didn't find. 'cause they didn't start with the word form.

[00:34:48] David Waumsley: Yeah, I know there were some that I've missed off on this. So they've all offered these sort of like free limits.

50 50, 50. There's one form, zillion offering, a hundred form bold offering a hundred for the free. And given that you get a hundred, if you use something like Netlify, which we can use as well, you get a hundred with that, they're not really offering much other than the fact that you. You may want some of the individual services that they offer on the backend, the way that they might connect up to other things, like maybe directly to Google Docs or something if you, or spreadsheets.

But they all behave differently. And I think most of these are exactly the same thing. You write your HTML, you put this one line saying to submit to this address that you've got, and that's what it does. So that's them pretty much. And then the one that's. Interesting to me is the third one, which is really the form builders we're talking about where we get third parties to do both the client and the server side of

[00:35:42] Nathan Wrigley: things.

So this is

[00:35:42] David Waumsley: much

[00:35:42] Nathan Wrigley: more SaaS service login set up your form. Yeah. They make your form code into a website and you're done. Yeah.

[00:35:48] David Waumsley: Yeah. and this is where I was blown away with what choices are, and I know I haven't included everyone that I came across here. and I got. Certainly AI struggled to find all the ones.

So obviously this is hugely competitive. the ones that I thought about on our list of these, is, oh,

[00:36:08] Nathan Wrigley: Shall I just read them into the record again? Just form Oh yeah. Read them into, so we've got paper form, fill out jot form, cognito forms type form. You're gonna have to scroll it. There you go. Thank you. Forster U Form nx. Oh, that's a nice title.

ate tally ADA form and form. Smarts I've never used. Oh no, I have, I've used paper form, the one at the top, but the others I don't believe I've ever used.

[00:36:32] David Waumsley: Yeah. And you, you were mentioning to me that you'd use Wooo from Oh yeah. Wooo,

[00:36:39] Nathan Wrigley: wooo, wooo, whatever, W-U-F-O-O back in the day. Yeah. That was one I tried out when this whole thing was brand new.

this allowed you to do all sort, it was clever. It was a really in innovative product. But now I think all of the products have got all of the features that they have. Yeah. and I also actually downloaded a few. paid for scripts which did things like fu So I downloaded a whole bunch of things which mimicked what these do, but it was self-hosted and in some cases it was open source.

There was one called Mac Formm, MACH Oh FORM, I dunno what it's called now. But yeah, there was that as well. yeah. what are you using? Are you using one of these on our website then?

[00:37:22] David Waumsley: Yeah. no I'm not because the, we've only got our one contact form. Oh, of course. Sorry, you've already said you were using the, forms spark thing.

Yeah, I have for a client, I've been using the paper form because that's the deal I've got on that. And, it works well. But, in fact, on my list here, 'cause I, set AI on the. The, task of trying to find out what was a, what was accessible, that was a key thing for me and, what we could get for free and whether they could connect up to Stripe for free Okay.

On that, because that's what a client particularly needed at the moment, who I'd put on paper form. Now, the problem was, is that. With the deal that I got, it's my account. And up to that point I could give him, 'cause I'm not using it for any other site other than this client. 'cause it was there and they've now put a security check.

So every time you try and log in, then it sends an email to my address. Oh, that renders that whole thing. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. So we're looking for other solutions and that's really what set me off on this one to

[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: see I've actually overcome that problem in the past by setting up a filter. In my, email client, which then forwards that email to them, but just, it's a

[00:38:36] David Waumsley: real clue.

It's not ideal. I thought that very thought and I thought, no, let's have a look, because I had a bit of an issue Anyway. I put it on their own domain because it's a heavy load, and that was another thing that's not on my chart. If you are, if you're looking at our show notes, it's all there. I haven't included it because I think we'll do an episode.

We'll come back and we'll look at all these when I've tested them all out and see, you know what my preference is. I've already got a preference so far, but I haven't tested them all out and spent some time. 'cause one thing that's quite interesting to me is now I signed up for the free accounts for a whole bunch of these who's.

Filling up my e email box with all sorts of, it's free, but not free of spam. No. And so jot form, which looks really good because it's, fully accessible and it does a really good job actually. It's beautiful actually how it works on their forms. Because if you've made a mistake, it comes up with this big red.

thing on the top, but it also announces to somebody using a screen reader, that they've made an error on where to go to and where to skip to and all that. It's really good. Oh, that is good. Yeah. Yeah. And they've got a free amount. You can, but very limited. For Stripe payments. You can only get 10 for free, but there's no extra charge on that one.

And you've got a hundred. Per month for them. So they look really, good. But I'm totally put off by the fact that they have just every day sent me some sort of email trying to Okay. you're the product, David, you are the product. Yes. Yes. and the same thing, I'll just quickly mention as well you form, which I didn't really like.

I have tested it out. I like the way that it's designed and the fact that it takes one question at a time and it'll move to the next screen and stuff. All that. Beautiful, but totally inaccessible on that one. I tried it with a screen reader, just, you don't know where you're going at all. So that's outta the question.

They call those conversational forms, don't you? Yes. One question

[00:40:29] Nathan Wrigley: and then you slide to the next, and I, to me it's nothing like a conversation, but

[00:40:33] David Waumsley: anyway, there you go. Yeah. we'll. We'll touch on that. I think having that ability to do that is a great thing, and many of them do that. And I think, as I say, I'm reading this book by Adam Silva's, and he's very keen on the fact that it's very good for, usability.

it does kind

[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: of lock you into the one question at a time thing. Yeah. But the bit that I don't like about it is that it disguises how much of the form is still to come, if So you might embark on a form and four minutes in you're like, I've no idea.

[00:41:02] David Waumsley: Exactly. If you know the stages and where you are going on this and that's, but then you don't know what the next, when you go to the next slide, effectively with these things, you how many entry, so you might think you are 90% there.

And then the last one's got,

[00:41:17] Nathan Wrigley: they get over the problem with things like a. Progress bar or something. Yes. bound to the top of the screen, but I'd still just rather see the form, the whole thing and work it out for myself.

[00:41:26] David Waumsley: Yeah. Anyway, paper forms, it's, it was easy to set up. It's logical, it's got lots of options there if you are, but there's no free option on this one.

But it wasn't accessible and they don't even mention anything about accessibility. And it was still, although it's got a lot lighter, it was still heavy. On the load. Okay. So I put it on their domain for his site because I didn't want it ruining the core web vitals, which were all pretty much close to a hundred, across the board.

And you only need one page that's listed on your site that's out and that can throw your whole fail, can't it? So, we put it on its own place there, but. We'll come back on this one because there's not much to say other than the fact that, you do get some more generous offers. And I think the one that I particularly like at the moment is Tally.

So is there, okay, this is new to me. I've not

[00:42:16] Nathan Wrigley: come across this, but very nice looking website. They've done a great job with that. What was it that you liked so much?

[00:42:23] David Waumsley: I like them. I like, the way that they talk, their blog, what they're talking about. They, went out on purpose to do it because things like these things to get.

Some of the things that you might need gets very expensive. you're on $25 per month to get, you get something free. Soon as you overstep it, then it gets really expensive and they've gone out to not do that, to make it as free as possible. And they've been very open and transparent in the blogs that I've seen about how they're making money on it.

So it, it's unlimited. For everything here, but you don't get some other things that you might want. remove the branding of course. And also, if you want to be able to style these forms with your own CSS, then you are limited on these kind of things. But they say they only need, they've been running basically on 2% of the people who are, their customers are paying for the pro version and that's enough for them to run their small business.

And I like them 'cause they're based in the eu. They're very open. They, They very much committed to a small group and bootstrapping rather than using venture capital, which I think, that's appeals to me anyway. So aligns with your, yeah. Fibers, shall we say? Your moral fibers.

Okay. Yes. Good. And what did it, and I missed it, completely missed it. I only caught it because I watched a YouTube video by Al Adam Silver and Become a bit of an expert because he is advising people like, gov UK and BBC and people like that. And the fact that he, obviously, he builds his own forms, but for one thing that he needed for his personal site, he used tally forms for this intermediate thing that he needed.

And I thought, if he's using it, then it's gotta be you. So a stamp from him. Good, Yes. Yeah. So that was basically it. And what else? There was some, as I say, there was some that I didn't include on this formed apps, because the fact that, and this is, I think. Might be common when I've checked them all out, but it was loading for the most simple form, which was basically your name, your email, and a message and nothing added.

We, we got, just in JavaScript alone, there was 1.5 megabytes over 49 different files for that. That was on form app, was it? Yeah. Their focus is on ai, which a lot of people are moving towards, so that's another off-putting thing for me personally, if they, okay. If they want to encourage you to use AI to create your forms now.

As I'm learning, there's a lot more to build in a good form and AI's not going to do a good job on it, so, those ones that head in that direction are not for me personally, I might suggest some of these just because of their ease. If I'm passing this on to a client and I say, that's your responsibility, this can sit on their domain.

we will just put a link on your site where they can do whatever they want there and book you and pay and all that and you are taking care of it, then that's fine. It doesn't interfere with me, and if they find one of these others a lot easier, I think probably. Many of these will be a lot easier than Tally, which is my favorite.

So

[00:45:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So there's a whole load of choices there. Yeah. So you feel that a piece of content in the future will be a more deep dive into the features and what have you. So you've obviously put a table together there. Yeah. But deep diving in on video to how these ones fare against each other given, I don't know, you maybe do a price comparison or you maybe do a JavaScript load comparison or something like that.

[00:45:46] David Waumsley: Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think it's amazing what we've got now these days for these form builders that can, do payments and do all these really complex and, a hundred per month of submissions. So as long as you can control spam, Which is the other side of it, that's the problem I think with a lot of them that give you a hundred, or netlify, I knew where I put our form, we were getting at least five spam emails a day.

that's over your a hundred used up straight away. So if you don't control that.

[00:46:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, some kind of capture like, I don't know, cloudflare's turnstile or something like that. Just in between it and the submit form. yeah. Okay. Yes. Okay. so there we go. Do you need a website to have a contact form? I don't know.

But certainly they're there, they're available, they can be used. Is that it? Are we done for today, do you think?

[00:46:34] David Waumsley: Yeah, if you were using one of these, one, just one little thing that I discovered, which I thought was quite interesting is say Google Docs, which I didn't, me, sorry. Google Forms, which I didn't mention earlier.

Google Forms. Yeah. it's great. You can embed it. You can't do much. It is good for accessibility, but if you wanted to put it in your, embed it in your, site. It downloads all of the fonts that are available in the form. So it becomes very heavy download.

[00:46:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:47:00] David Waumsley: But you can get away with that one, which I was just playing around with because of iframes allow you to lazy load.

Oh, the call my vitals is not hit. Yes. If it's down in the bottom of the page or you put it in, details and summary. Okay. So it only appears when it's clicked on, so you can overcome that. Page load difficulty. So yeah. Okay. So the drawback is it's downloading

[00:47:22] Nathan Wrigley: all the fonts. The pro of that is you don't need to load the form Yes.

Until you're ready to see it. Okay. So from an SEO hit, that might not be quite so bad. Still curious that it's loading all the fonts you mean? All the fonts?

[00:47:35] David Waumsley: All the fonts. I think all the fonts that. I wish I'd brought it up on here because I did do a test on it, but it was all of the fonts that, certainly were in the forms.

God knows why. I told you, I did question this and got AI to say, why on earth did they do this, and is there a workaround? And, they gave a plausible thing to me with my small brain when it comes to backend stuff about why they did this for everybody's, to. It's just so it's available to everybody.

I don't know. You would imagine

[00:48:08] Nathan Wrigley: though, that you only need the fonts that you need on the

[00:48:11] David Waumsley: form

[00:48:11] Nathan Wrigley: that are being used on the form, but it is,

[00:48:13] David Waumsley: it's ridiculous with Google, isn't it? It's the same with YouTube. We have to take all these extra precautions to stop it. They're the people who have really got us to think about page load, and they're the people who make it so difficult for us.

Make it difficult to achieve it. Difficult. Yeah.

[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: The the, the, hand doesn't know what the leg is doing or some. Thing like, yes, I don't remember. Okay. In which case, I will remove the screen share and I will say thank you. So that was our first look at forms in follow up episodes. Looks like we're gonna be doing, yeah, content in which we'll describe what each of the forms does and what have you.

and so I guess. We'll see you next time. It is. Oh, thanks for that. Oh, like I can subscribe. David, let's say that one more time. If you enjoyed this. Yeah. Please, hit the subscribe button onto the YouTube video and that enables YouTube to, to notify you when we produce new content, which would, be nice for you and

[00:49:04] David Waumsley: nice

[00:49:04] Nathan Wrigley: for us.

[00:49:05] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think generally, because we don't, we're not promoting any, we've got no commercial element to this. to be able to keep going with this one, we need to feel that people are actually,

[00:49:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I haven't told you about my new SaaS service. It's called Forms Bank or something like that.

I haven't told you about that. We'll leave that for the next episode. I'll, review it on that, bomb. Shell see you next time. Yeah. Cheers byebye. Bye.