Developer’s Blog

We have some exciting news and changes to share with you. Today we are introducing the amazing Smart Zone! Since our web forms are so “smart” in that they gather tons of useful information with each submission, we thought it only made sense to add the “SmartZone” to take the data and turn it into actual strategies that will help you optimize your PPC Campaigns, SEO Campaigns, Radio Advertising, Print Advertising and much more.

The Smart Zone will analyze your form submissions and give you clear information regarding what keywords are working, geo targeting, day parting schedules and more. The interesting thing about all of this is that we are analyzing CONVERTING traffic, as opposed to ALL TRAFFIC. So, say goodbye to Web Analytics and please welcome Conversion Analytics; care of Best Contact Form.

Be sure to check out the preview of The Smart Zone. Or, if you are already a Premiere Account, the smart zone is included as our gift to you. Enjoy!

Price Changes
With the new features we are also going to be coming out of BETA & some price changes have occurred. Any existing plans are grandfathered in. Please see our new pricing page for details.

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We’ve added another feature that can help you better manage your ad campaigns. You can now see a graph of the number of submissions based on either:

• The Day of The Week
• The Hour of The Day

With this information you can really see when your visitor’s are converting and optimize your campaigns to deliver then. Check it out by logging into your account, clicking “Which Keywords Convert->What’s Being Used The Most” and then change the drop down to “Days of The Week” or “Hours of The Day”.

Let us know if there is another graph you’d like to see.

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There is a new feature available that I think is quite interesting. I realized that a lot of you were spending a lot of time Re-Creating forms that already exist on your site. And, while this is great if you are starting fresh, it wastes a lot of your precious time if you just want to enhance your current forms with BestContactForm.com.

So, there is now a new link when creating a new form called: Create from a form on another website, which will try to generate a form in the form builder based on a form at another website.

If you thought that was neat, listen to this:
If all goes well, you can then simply change 2 lines on your existing form, and your form will now be running off BestContactForm.com with all the benefits. There is no need to change your form element’s variable names, as our system will be smart enough to map them to your bestcontactform.com’s form.

Here’s how it works:

1. You simply enter in a URL of the page that your current form resides on.
2. Choose a simple thank you page (more likely), or have it repost to your form. The repost will enable advanced integration.
3. Click Next Step

Magical Things Occur
Now, our system will visit that URL and attempt to parse out all forms on the page. If there are multiple forms, it will ask you to choose the correct one. If there was only one form it will try and build the form with our form builder. It will extract the title of your  page and use that as the form name, it can grab the form’s ACTION and use that to repost the variables, and it will build as many elements as it can, including drop downs, check boxes, textarea, textboxes, passwords, etc.

You should instantly have a form if things go well. Sometimes, if your HTML is improper, it may not be able to parse the form data. So, at the very least make sure all your tags have matching closing tags You can leave things as they are, or you can change the question names. They will default to the variable names of your existing form.

Now, all you have to do is change the ACTION of your form, and add the captcha code (if enabled). By the way, you can disable captcha codes and play with the style by clicking the advanced tab.

The full instructions will be in the Get HTML code tab.

And, as always, it’s a good idea to insert your tracking code on every page of your site, to ensure optimal keyword tracking.

Have Fun!

- Brian

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We have designed a new logo. It’s now plastered all over our website, including this blog.

Also, a great little web2.0 site that deserves a mention is http://www.quickribbon.com. The BETA ribbon you see on our site was created in about 30 seconds using this website.

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Today we released the ability to integrate a Best Contact Form with any existing processing script. What that means is, let’s say you have a sign up form on your website. When a user fills out your sign up form, the data is sent to your processing script which might validate it and then create a new record in a database. Now, you can leave your processing script as is, and replace your sign up form with a Best Contact Form.

What happens now is that your user will fill out your sign up form (which is actually a Best Contact Form). The data is sent to our servers. We check required fields, Spam Protection, and then archive the data (along with any keywords, referrers, etc.).

Here’s The Magical Part
Next, our form will take all the data that your visitor posted (including any hidden fields you have in your form), and send it back to your processing script. So, your processing script can then validate data, add to the database, or do whatever else you want.

The added benefit now, is that you have keyword data, referrer data, location information, search engine, etc. with any existing form.

Our integration will even map your Best Contact Form Questions to the proper variable names of your existing processing form. The goal is that you should not have to change your existing processing form.

Let us know what you think.

Purchase Forms (Taking Credit Cards)
If you have a long purchase process that gathers lots of information before a customer enters their credit card information. This would be a great example of where to use this. On your page that asks for the Customer’s Personal information (name, address, etc.), you could make this a Best Contact Form, and then forward the data back to your next processing script. That way, credit card information is NOT stored on our servers.

We currently do NOT allow storing credit card information on our servers.

View the Process Here

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We just released a plugin for WordPress that will allow you to easily integrate a Best Contact Form with WordPress. “Why would I need a plugin, you blathering bafoon! I can simply copy and paste the form code, mmm?” And you’d be right… If being right was wrong!

You see, WordPress has a nasty habit of rewriting code. Even if you switch to the Code tab while writing a post, it still seems to encode it as HTML characters. This really throws off the old web browsers. So, plugins to the rescue.

With our new supermagicalgizmo plugin, you can just paste the tracking code once, and it automatically puts it at the bottom of every page on your WordPress site.

Also, whenever you want your form to appear all you do is type {BCF_FORM} and it magically appears.

Watch, here it comes:

An asterisk (*) indicates a required field.
First Name
Last Name
Email *
Comments
Spam Protection Enter this word:
	Contact Us Form is powered by BestContactForm.com

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I thought I’d share with you all a neat way to create screencast video tutorials absolutely free. For some examples of what you can do, please check out the video tutorials on Best Contact Form. The first shows you how our website forms grab keyword data, the second shows how you can create a form with our drag & drop Ajax form creator.

CamStudio
These videos were both created using the free open source program CamStudio, available at: http://www.camstudio.org. Kudos to the CamStudio team for this great piece of software. Basically, you run the program, click record, and it captures whatever happens on your screen, including microphone input.

A Word of Caution
Make sure you do the following or you might have some problems with the recording:

1. Click Options->Enable Autopan
   This will make the current recording area follow your mouse.
2. Download and Install the Video Codec here
   This will allow for much clearer and faster frame-rates. Once you have installed the codec, go to Options->Video Options and select the CamStudio Lossless Codec v1.0.

Avoid Plosive Sounds
Plosive sounds are those loud clicks or thumps that you hear when you record into a microphone without a windscreen and pronounce any word that produces…. well…. wind.

Hold your hand in front of your mouth and say “Peter Piper Picked.” Notice the wind? When that hits your microphone, bad things happen, so get a wind screen. All a wind screen does is stop wind from passing through to the microphone, yet allows sound to travel freely. You don’t have to buy an expensive windscreen for most recordings. For instance, a piece of tissue paper would work, as would some pantyhose stretched around a wire hanger. Whatever floats your boat.

Have fun!

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Howdy everyone! Today begins the quest to document the ongoing development of BestContactForm.com. My hope is to offer some useful tidbits of information about our software and how we go about creating it. Perhaps some of it will be of use to you all.

To fill people in, Best Contact Form is a website created to take website forms to the next level. Yes, I know there are some nifty Ajax form builders out there (not too many, though). And, yes our form builder does make use of Ajax. But our forms have a little bit more hidden under the hood.

You see, whenever someone fills out a form created with Best Contact Form, it will fetch the keyword, referrer, & search engine data and archive that along with any form posting. So now, when your visitors fill out your contact form, we’ll tell you how they found you. Think of the possibilities if you’re in the lead generation business.

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