How do you accept form submissions on your static site?
I have developed — and currently host — several static websites, which always need some version of a contact form.
How do you handle form submissions on your static website? How do you work with that data? Which services do you use? What are some pain points you have with doing all this, that haven't yet been addressed?
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"What are some pain points you have with doing all this, that haven't yet been addressed?" Is the same as asking "Give me some startup idea around this please".
Read The Mom Test, it gives superb advice on how to talk to customers and learn about their problems in an indirect way so you can get proper and honest feedback
Ah. I see how I might have come across that way.
I wasn't thinking about this as asking customers, but more as asking peers if they're having some of the same problems as me. I couldn't find a service suited to my needs, and I wanted to see if it was just me.
But since posting this, I have been checking out a lot of services in this space, and I think I see a gap which I can fill — so I'll indeed be building a form backend :) I think it will be fun to build it openly on IH too, so stay tuned!
Thanks for the advice, and the few pages I've read so far of The Mom Test are great.
I have two ways I do this with static sites.
Hope this helps :)
Thankyou! I've just been introduced to Airtable — looks great, I'll check it out.
Cool, I would love to hear what you think and find. I'm always looking to improve my process and workflow.
Thanks, I'll update here / share a blog post with what I find 👍
I've used StaticForms for all my recent projects.
Disclosure...I built StaticForms! :-)
I agree dope product! How did you come up with your pricing? I am a fan of the charge-per-submissions route vs unlimited.
I was trying to find a balance between charging for value provided, affordability, and limiting my risk...running the product has a cost and I didn’t want to be exposed to uncapped costs if someone used it and got huge volumes of responses. I’m not sure the pricing is right yet though .
Hey, neat product!
Disclosure: As I mentioned in another comment, I am thinking of building a form backend — so we're neighbours I guess :)
Honestly, it’s a crowded space and whilst it’s not too hard to get users, it’s very hard to get paying customers. It was a fun challenge building StaticForms, but success is much more about marketing than the technical side, and I’m no marketer.
How do you host the static site? If you use netlify they have a forms feature where with a little bit of setup (adding a tag to the html form), it'll collect any form data in any POST request. I use this for 2 projects that I host on netlify.
Netlify Forms looks great, but I don't know how I'll give form / submission data access to other non-tech people — if I'm just building the site for them, I typically don't want to be able to look at their data; and I wouldn't want to give them access to my Netlify team because there are other sites there.
Google Apps script that saves a new row to a Google Sheet and redirects to thank you page.
It does not have email double opt in though, so there's some spam when I'm using it for collecting an email list.
I'm actually work on this. Do you mind saving my info so we can talk about this later?
That's a pretty nice idea. I haven't worked with Apps script before, though. How do you transfer the emails elsewhere once you've collected them: I suppose you'll want to put them on mailchimp or something?
Apps scripts are Javascript/Typescript scripts that have some pre-authorized API clients.
Like if you pre-authorize your app script with a Google Sheet, then your script can be something like:
You can also do really simple API endpoints, send mail with Gmail etc.
Now I use it with my personal blogs, so I'm copy-pasting the emails from sheets to Gmail's bcc field. If I would use MailChimp, they would have their own form API that I could use. But as I'm not making any money off my blogs (at least yet), I don't have much budget for using commercial tools (at least MailChimp is pretty pricey for my use case). Some cheaper tools have better price points, but they usually use shared IPs for sending all mail and don't have as good reputation systems so they're usually blacklisted by Gmail and others — and there's no incentive for those providers to do anything about it since they upsell private IP sender addresses to fix that spam folder problem.
Thanks for the concise explaination, @jehna :)
I used to recommend https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good to people who wanted cheaper alternatives to send email. Although the repo is archived now, it might be worth taking a look at.
Good luck to you! :)
Airtable solves all my problems. I was debating on creating a no-code form builder, but there really doesn't seem to be any point.
For catcpha validation, I use a simple aws lambda function that's basically free (doubt it'll hit more than 1 million requests a month), and then make a HTTP request to Airtable to store the content.
It works well so far!
Great!
One of my biggest issues was easily building forms that calculated in the browser. So I created sheetform.io(website not live). It turns a spreadsheet into a embeddable calculator form for your website.
What do you mean by calculator form? Do you mean that it converts spreadsheet formulae into form inputs?
I meant it takes a spreadsheet, and converts it into a html form where most, if not all of the formulas still work live in the browser..
Neat idea! Good luck :)
Thanks!
A good static website forms backend worth taking a look at is https://fabform.io
I use Netlify for hosting and their forms feature. For newsletter signups, I create a Zapier zap that adds new Netlify form submissions automatically to my list in Mailerlite.
I used Formcarry for a while and it's super easy to implement and configure https://formcarry.com/
Looks neat! And I love the website design :)
For super low-tech: Just make the form submit to your static site with query parameters, and have the destination be a thank you page. And then every day, process your web logs for new form submissions.
Nice trick, but I suspect this will become real high-tech real fast, for multiple reasons:
This is just my opinion, and to give an insight to people who might chance upon this later. But if it works for you, then great! Thanks for sharing :)