This is BlueFur’s blog series: Everyday Solutions! This series focuses on quick and easy solutions for common problems experienced by website owners.
For the average person, building a contact form can be difficult. 15 years ago when finding a talented web developer was far more difficult, building a form from scratch often involved using Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver’s built-in tools. If you were not fortunate enough to have a functioning WYSIWYG editor on-hand, you were stuck with Notepad and reading several tutorials trying to slap together what you wanted.
Ah, 1997. But we digress…
With how far things have come since that time, many people still have trouble with forms. And that’s okay! You’re a business owner. Or a graphic designer. Or a stay-at-home mom. You’re not a web developer, and you would much rather focus your time on great content, not on coding. If you use WordPress to power your website, you are in luck.
There is a wealth of contact form plugins out there, the most popular being Contact Form 7, Formstack, Gravity Forms, and Fast Secure Contact Form. Well there is a new kid on the block that’s making waves, and it is well worth a look.
Ninja Forms is slick. Really slick. It has a drag and drop editor to help you place your fields exactly where you want them, reusable fields, the ability to import/export both forms and data, and the ability to add custom styling.
That’s all well and good, but where most contact form plugins fall short for us is during the form creation process. Often things look out of place, the interface has a very high learning curve, and your form elements don’t actually end up where you want them to go. Ninja Forms’ interface makes that all disappear by being very clear about what does what, how to place fields where you want them, and providing all the extras like data validation, hidden fields, and file uploads.
As well as making it easy to build your form, the preview function is far, far easier to use than any other. With every other contact form plugin we have used we are always told to insert the shortcode into a page and then preview the page. Not so with Ninja Forms! There is a handy “Form Preview” link that will actually open the form in a new tab/window in your browser, no embedding necessary.
Beyond all that. it features integrations with many popular services like PayPal, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Freshbooks. It’s a very handy tool that goes beyond simple contact forms. Try Ninja Forms out for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments!
