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Wedding program template
Whatever the size or the purpose of your Internet venture, gathering information from users and integrating that feedback with your back-end systems has always been a hassle. You want to post easy-to-use fill-in forms on your site, and you want to tabulate user responses quickly and easily. All of these tasks require databases, and databases aren't that easy to deploy.
The problem with handling database tasks on the Web is building the interaction. A database by itself isn't worth very much; what makes it valuable is the two-way information stream it provides. First, you and your users can make queries against the data in order to yield meaningful results. Second, users (with the proper per-missions) can add to the database by creating and editing records or by filling in forms. In both cases, creating the Web interface for the database requires programming, or at least a Web editor that will perform the programming for you.
HTML forms are a good example. Although they have always been simple enough to design, making them do anything useful required programming, which typically meant using Perl to create CGI programs in the Web document that would accept and return data. And making the CGI program interact with your database application required more extensive programming.
In the past couple of years, the need for programming has been reduced to a degree by HTML editing programs (such as Microsoft FrontPage) and other packages designed to make form creation easier, but form programming remains a difficult part of Web design. Even if you use FrontPage, you enjoy full database integration only through Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 systems running Microsoft Internet Information Services. If you're leasing space from a Web hosting service that's running, say, Linux servers, you'll probably have to do at least some programming for your database interactions anyway.
None of this is a problem, of course, if you have the money and time for specialists to design your forms. But if you have neither, or if you have no inclination to get into even rudimentary programming, your chances of being able to put up an HTML database application have been quite remote. Until now.
New Web services let you create online databases and forms. The three early entries into the Web database category are Activespace (www.activespace.com), Bitlocker (www.bitlocker.com), and FormSite.com. The sites offer free versions, and some have upgraded, for-pay versions as well. In all cases, trying the free service will give you a strong sense of whether you'll need the additional features of the pay version. We'll look here at some of the ways in which these services can help you and your business.
Avoid Form Programming
FormSite.com lets you design and mount a fill-in form on your Web site. The service will also host the form, and you simply provide a link to the form from your Web site (and a link back, of course). Because forms aren't hard to design when you're using HTML editors, the important part of this service is the hosting. FormSite.com takes care of the interaction between the scripts and the Web server, which is the biggest obstacle to making forms work.
The free service limits you to a maximum of five forms and 30 items on each form. The downside is that all your forms will show advertising. For $49.95 per year, the Deluxe service gives you 1,000 results per form, 30 forms, 100 items per form, and 1,000 form submissions per month. There are also three Professional plans, ranging from $199.95 to $499.95 per year, that increase these numbers and add password-protected forms, SSL security, and advertising-free forms. We'll look at the free version.
You can design forms from scratch or choose templates to speed up the process. In FormSite.com's case, the template feature is somewhat unusual. Only a few templates are available, and they're too generic to be very useful. Furthermore, they're not really samples to work from; they're elements to include in forms you're designing on your own. These templates provide typical fields and feedback elements for such things as product orders, registration, customer surveys, interview feedback, and guest books. But the bulk of the form is up to you.
The trick to making a useful form with FormSite.com is to experiment. Starting with a template, even if you end up changing all of it, lets you see the possibilities and learn the interface (which takes a bit of getting used to). Anything you do can be changed, and you can add new fields even when the form is already published. In fact, it's published as soon as you click the first Submit button. The form is sent to a directory on FormSite.com that you designate.
The types of fields available are limited, but there are certainly enough for most form uses. You can employ radio buttons, check boxes, drop-down lists, text fields, text boxes, and option fields such as Yes/No, True/False, and Easy/Difficult. FormSite.com also provides value fields, such as Age, Education, state of residence, and Marital Status, that are easily readable for reports based on your forms.
You can edit elements on your forms by selecting the item from the Form Items box and clicking the Update button. Once your form is on the Web and accessible by others, the data collected is presented in two Public Results URLs for that form. You can link to the results pages to let users access them, or you can keep the data yourself. The first URL lays out the number of responses for each possible field value, the percentage of the total for each response, and a bar graph beside each value to give you a graphical data format. The second URL shows the results in a sortable table. FormSite.com will e-mail form results to you, if you ask, and the service can send an automatic e-mail response to each user who completes your form.
Sharing Your Databases
Creating and hosting forms are essential services, of course, but two companies take online databases several steps further. Activespace and Bitlocker let you create and mount a wide variety of database types for sharing among colleagues, friends, or the Web public in general. Both services offer pre-designed business-related, home-related, and education-related databases you can install and customize; you can also build databases from scratch. You can produce Web-based forms using these services, but FormSite.com tends to be easier to use for this specific function.
We'll take a look at Bitlocker, the more established of the two services (as of this writing, Activespace was still in beta). We highly recommend that you try both, though, because although they're similar in function, their strengths and interfaces are significantly different. Bitlocker's free service gives you 25MB of space, with banner ads appearing on your pages. The paid version ($99 per year) bumps you up to 100MB of space and gets rid of the ads. Activespace's Web-site FAQ indicated that pricing would be determined once the full product launches. For now, the service is free.
Bitlocker's business templates include an advertising schedule, a customer-feedback tracker, an event planner, a product-registration form, an employee-evaluation form, and a job-application tracker. For home users, databases can keep track of movie libraries, school activities, wine cellars, gift lists, and wedding plans. Each database has an associated sample and template. You can work directly from either.
These databases are useful by themselves, but the real point is that your database becomes available to other users over the Web. All of your sales and customer-service reps can contribute to the customer-feedback and sales-lead databases, for example, and all managers can add information to the employee-evaluation forms. You can make your database public, as you would in the case of an openly available Web form, or you can restrict access in a variety of ways. You can establish workgroups to collaborate on databases, and you can invite people into the workgroup via e-mail or by searching the Bitlocker user base.
Creating and modifying a database takes getting used to, but Bitlocker's interface is the most straightforward of the services. None of the database examples is particularly complex, and that's worth keeping in mind when you create new ones. Databases need not be complex to be effective. In fact, the more complex a database is, the more difficulty contributors will have adding records. Still, you can add as many fields as you need to make your database function according to your needs. You can also import data from existing databases and include calculated fields in your Bitlocker databases.
Databases serve many functions. Online databases can increase functionality in specific ways, particularly with their ability to let others contribute. FormSite.com, Activespace, and Bitlocker let you work with online databases without your own database servers or extensive Web programming, and that is an obvious advantage.
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