There are a lot of different things that I get excited about, one of them is when I stumble upon a great plug-in for WordPress. It’s especially thrilling when I know it will make life a little easier for my clients.
I was recently asked to create a multi-page form to collect information about people looking into Executive Space for their office needs. The form is very complex with a ton of fields. There were two elements to this that were going to make it difficult:
1. Having the form span four pages
2. Having fields appear or disappear based on information the user entered (Conditional Menus).
I’ve hand-coded a bunch of forms, but I had never done those two items so I went digging. What I found was an amazing plugin called Gravity Forms. It’s not free, but if you want to do anything even slightly complex with a form on a site built in WordPress it is worth the $40. It makes creating forms painless and then sends the response in a wonderfully styled email that makes it extremely easy to read.
The original site I discovered this for (AtlantaExecutiveSpace.com) is still being built out at the moment, but I loved it so much that I implemented it in another site. Tin Drum Asia Cafe wanted to have their existing form that collects information on potential franchisees updated so they could have a better understanding of where their prospects were coming from. I accomplished this by adding Conditional Menus that will directly show the results of their various marketing efforts and give them a better understanding of their ROI. You can check out the form here.
There are also some amazing add-ons to this plugin that make it even more robust including simple exporting of collected data, connecting it to email marketing software, and more. If you think this is something that might make capturing data for your site easier let me know if I can help in any way.
