This is a test of Sidewalk. Sidewalk lets you create web forms very, very simply, and stick them on your website without any application development whatsoever – and very little technical ability or knowledge at all.
Here’s my first test … tell me something that’s cool:
The best thing about this is not that anyone can do it. (OK, maybe it is.)
But the second best thing is that I don’t have to get a developer to build something. Two minutes with this tool saves me getting a developer to build something … and saves that developer an hour of his time.
The other reason that this kind of service is really, really important, is that every company or group that has a website occasionally has the need for some totally out-of-the-box wild blue-sky widget on their site. The CEO wants to check if people who buy green widgets like salted herring, or something like that.
Well, in a traditional development world, that’s somehow got to be fit into a site or application data model. It never will. And it never should.
And now, it never has to.
Credit:
I saw it first on Emily Chang’s eHub blog.
Two other players in a similar space: Wyacracker, and The Form Assembly. Cool thing about Form Assembly is that you can also do file uploads.
Hey, thanks for the kind words. We built Sidewalk exactly for the reasons you described. There is no reason gathering information should be difficult, or outside the possibility of anyone online. We’re excited by the possibilities this opens up to small businesses and organizations, and we can’t wait to see the uses everyone comes up with!
Thanks,
Your friendly Sidewalk development team.
There’s a recent review of AJAX-ified Web-based form designers at http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/wufoo-challenges-infopath-for-form.html. The post includes a detailed analysis of Wufoo with a live data-entry form and several screen captures.
[…] they’re typically much, much easier to use. Similar tools include Sidewalk (which I’ve mentioned before), The Form Assembly, and […]