2 good and 1 sorta crappy way to add forms to your website

There’s a bunch of ways to add forms to your site, and some of them don’t even suck or cost money. In general, all the methods allow you to create a form with fields (name, e-mail, etc.) and when a visitor types data into the fields and hits the ’send’ button, you get an e-mail with the results.

Here are some options, in reverse order of quality:

Download a free PHP script ($0.00)
Lots of sites have free PHP scripts. It’s cool that people have gone to all kinds of work to make this kind of stuff available to those of us who couldn’t do it for ourselves, but a lot of the time these scripts are hard to use, and there isn’t much help available if the script doesn’t work (and trust me, sometimes it just doesn’t work).
Good: It’s free.
Bad: Get an error when someone pushes ‘Submit’? Suck it.

CoffeeCup Web Form Builder ($39.00)
It’s not free, but this program has a genius way of building forms. You make the form from a list of predefined elements (drop-down menus, text boxes, radio buttons) and the program makes a flash .SWF that you place in your ‘Contact Us’ page, along with a couple of other files. Tell it where to e-mail the results and upload the files to your server and you’re done. You can even add one of those irritating ‘captchas’ (see picture). We used CoffeeCup Web Form Builder to make the Customer Support form for our T-shirt site.
Good: Very easy to use, and CoffeeCup has lots of online help. Bonus: When a new version of the program comes out, you get to download it for free. Go to hell, every other software company.
Bad: You can use any font you want, but the program doesn’t embed the fonts in the .SWF file, so if the font you use isn’t on the visitors’ computer, you’re stuck with Arial (or worse).

Zoho Creator ($0.00)
How does this company make money? I have no idea. I don’t care. The point is that this is the best way to make a web form, and all you have to do is copy and paste some code, like embedding a YouTube video. Zoho Creator is part of a big group of online applications; instead of installing the program on your computer, you use the software over the interweb, and all of your data is stored on the server, so you can get it anywhere you can get online.

Building the forms is easy. After you register for your account, you make a new form in a drag-and-drop way similar to CoffeeCup Form Builder. Creator also allows you to have the results from each visitor sent to a bunch of e-mail addresses. BUT, it also allows specific users to log in and see the results of each visitor displayed as a spreadsheet, all in one place.

We used Zoho Creator to make an online appointment system for a barber shop. Originally the stylists were getting e-mailed every time someone entered an appointment into the system, but every so often, one would get deleted/sent to bulk mail/whatever so we wanted to find a system that let the hairdressers login and see all open appointments at once.
Good:It’s free and completely idiot-proof.
Bad:Other than the border color around the form, you have very little control over what it looks like, so pretentious design-tards may have a hard time matching it to their site. And, seriously, how does this company make money?