General Review Of Five Free Web Data Collection Forms
If you have tried to gain information from visitors to your website, having a data collection form is required as a necessary data collection technique. Here are five free varieties which use simple cut and paste instillations.
Response-O-Matic
This web based data collection form is a simple method of gaining information or feedback from your sites customers. Response-O-Matic allows site owners to put a contact form on their website. There is no programming knowledge required. Your page is up and running within 8 minutes. Some advantages to this tool:
- Unlimited amount of questions can be put into the form
- Unlimited amount of submissions from visitors
- Spam-protection stops useless information being entered
- After a visitor has answered via the form you can send them to a chosen webpage..
- Automatic data back-ups as well as a statistics package give the geographic locations of site visitors
Some disadvantages with the free version of this data collection form:
- Only one form per account
- The paid version is suited for multiple websites needing feedback
- Ads are embedded with the free version
- The paid version allows exporting into Microsoft Excel
Capcha ZDR
Most owners of membership or forum sites must constantly deal with spam bots. One data collection tool helping fight this is a Captcha code. These are PHP scripts which eliminate spam attacks. Captcha ZDR offers the following uses:
- String protection
- Calculation protection - both sum and deduction
- Noise in images and string symbols which spam bots find hard to read
Some advantages to this data collection form:
- The program is an easily downloaded compressed file with instillation instructions
- You can tweak the PHP to show any message you want
- Captcha ZDR creates images that legitimate users can understand and respond to
Hesk
Hesk is another form of data collection software integratable into your website. This is a PHP help desk ticket support system. This system allows you to gain comments and questions from your clients avoiding the need to create and monitor a special email address for this. Some advantages to using Hesk:
- The program uses the MySQL server to hold pertinent information for tickets
- A simple interface allows viewing new, pending, unanswered or reopened tickets
- Canned replies for questions which are routinely asked
- Instillation is a zip file onto your web server then providing the needed information
Web Contact Form Generator
This is another tool which creates a contact form. This data collection form can be generated with scripts for ASP, PHP, and Perl. Simple input of required fields and choice of script is all that is needed. Other advantages to this tool are:
- The entry fields can range from asking for an email to asking for more information pertaining to the visitor
- Web Contact Form Generator will run on most browsers
Form Field Validation Tool
This is an online data collection form which filters more common errors in data entry before being submitted. This data collection form has four different validations possible.
- Specifying the minimum and maximum character lengths; setting this field to 1 sets up required fields of information
- Email validation certifies the structure of any email entered follows standard format
- Limitations to the exact number of digits allowed; used for phone numbers, zip codes and dates
- Defined value ranges for validations such as age and birthdays
