Why You Should Use Wufoo Forms Instead of Creating HTML Custom Coded Forms for Your Website

Save yourself time by using Wufoo to create online forms instead of coding custom HTML or PHP forms yourself. Build a form yourself in just minutes!

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By: Johan Lieu

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Why You Should Use Wufoo Forms Instead of Creating HTML Custom Coded Forms for Your Website

Okay, okay, we know that some of you out there are purists: A website isn’t handcrafted and an original creation unless you do all of the coding yourself, including the builds on custom HTML forms. It may take extra time, but for you the pro-programmer, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Right? Can we borrow your attention for a moment?

We here at Wufoo aren’t going to try and dissuade you from your purist ways, but we do believe we can make a pretty compelling case for you to use Wufoo’s forms instead of painstakingly custom-HTML coding every single form. See, we’re coding aficionados ourselves, and we’re really proud of our product–so proud, in fact, that we think even coding ninjas like you will love it. And, we promise we won’t tell anyone if you decide to use some of our forms instead of custom HTML coding.

Here are a few reasons you should consider integrating our forms:

Building forms to collect data takes time–a lot of time

Forms designed to capture information (such as surveys, online order forms, or registration pages) take even more time than normal custom-HTML coding projects. You have to create all of the database structures and scripts, in addition to crafting the design. It’s tedious, and though you may understand how skillful you have to be to create said forms, chances are, your users won’t. For them, a form is a form. When you use Wufoo’s forms, we do all of the hard stuff for you. We build the database, backend, and scripts to collect your data, and we host it (securely, of course), freeing you up to focus on that drop-dead gorgeous design code you’re famous for.

You can host and just use our XHTML and CSS

If you’re still reading, then we’ve glad we’ve caught your attention–there’s more good news. Because we’re sharers. We are. If you’re impressed with our code, and you’d like to design and download the XHTML and CSS and apply it to your site, you can. For free. You can handle your server stuff and just use our very attractive CSS/XHTML form markup. Simply create an account, and you’ll be able to design and download your markup.

Instead of coding, try Drag ‘n Drop

We know you’re really good at coding, but we think you’ll really enjoy the ease and time-saving powers of our Form Builder. Instead of throwing down lines and lines (and lines) of code, drag ‘n drop the elements where you want them, and create the form to be as custom as you wish. You can still add in your own HTML touch, of course, but save yourself some serious time by taking our Form Builder for a test drive. You won’t regret it.

Copy and paste our code

Remember when we said we’re sharers? Another super neat-o feature to explore is our Share page. If you happen to see a form or survey that you think would enhance your site, just copy and paste the code snippet into your website, email newsletter, blog post, or social media page. Alternatively, you can take a zip file of the HTML or CSS code and hook it into your database. It’s not stealing, not at all.

Enjoy the benefits of logic and branching, without the hassle of coding it

Let’s say you want to create a registration page for an event you’re hosting. You’d like to have a dynamic form that follows logic you’ve specified. So for example, if people click on one field, then you want other fields to be hidden, or you want the form to skip ahead a few pages. Coding this could take hours, days. Weeks. We know–because we’ve built it in for you. Save yourself the hassle and just use our Rule Builder to create the logic and branching you want incorporated into your forms, and focus your attention on other, more glamorous parts of designing your site.

Collect data that’s valid, and leave the coding to us

When people go to fill out a form or survey, their data may be invalid if they don’t enter in the correct number of characters or fill out all of the fields. Save yourself the big-time hassle of coding each and every validation script by simply using one of our forms with Field Validation. Set up your rules: Choose which fields are required, make sure emails are properly formatted, and even get prompted when there are errors so you can keep conversion rates high.

Your Wufoo forms will be secure, we promise

Finally, to address a fear we know you have, yes, your data will be secure. When you code and build web pages yourself, you have full visibility to the security measures you build in. If you choose to use Wufoo forms, rest assured that we, too, take security very seriously. We manage our servers in-house at a SOC 2 Type II audited facility in the U.S. We include 128-bit SSL encryption on all of our plans, and you can store information in an encrypted format in the database. Feel better?

Still curious how Wufoo works?

Wufoo is an easy-to-use online tool that allows anyone to create and build online forms–no coding or programming required. And Wufoo hosts and stores everything, so you don’t have to worry about where your forms or data will live.

You can completely customize the look and feel of your forms using our Theme Designer by choosing colors to fit your brand or theme, as well as adding your company’s logo or your wedding colors to your forms. You can even use one of almost 300 form templates in our Form Gallery to jump start creating your forms, or look at our Examples to see how you can use Wufoo in your company.

Wufoo partners and works with loads of other applications, allowing you to accept data and information through your forms and send it other applications that your company uses. We have integrations with applications like MailChimp, Dropbox, Zapier, Salesforce, WordPress, and more.