Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin used originally for contact forms, but in a more general sense, it allows site owners to create forms to collect information. It is my prefer forms plugin for wordpress, as it is easy to use but it almost unlimited in its use. So here are my top 5 uses for Gravity Forms.
Contact Form
The most used type of form I create with Gravity forms is a simple contact us form. Allowing you to collect the information you want from your visitor, i.e Name, Email Address and a message. I find this a much better solution then a link to your email address, as this option has two issues, firstly your email address can be scraped from your site and used for spamming and secondly email links often do not work for users who use web mail systems such as google mail. A gravity form, set up correctly, will send you a formatted email and display the user a nice thank you message. You are also able to download all your responses into a spreadsheet too which is an added bonus.
Subscribe to our mailing List
Gravity forms has additional add-ons, which allows it to interface with 3rd party systems such as Mailchimp, making it so easy to set up and add to mailing list form, or adding an option to your contact form to add them to your mailing list too. This can be done using the conditional logic included for each field on the form.
Course Booking Form
If you offer courses or training on your site, having a course booking form is simply created using gravity forms. Linking to the form you can send the course title as a variable so a single form can be used for multiple course bookings, collecting all the data you require from the candidate. You can even add payment options to the form using the paypal add on making it a totally integrated booking system, you can even add a mail chimp link to the form to set up a mailing list for the course too.
Questionaire or Survey
You can build a complex survey or questionaire using gravity forms using a selection of drop down answers, radio buttons, check boxes or text answers. Using the conditional logic you can vary questions depending on the answer to earlier questions too. The great thing is once your survey has been run, you can download all the answers as a spreadsheet to run your analysis.
Accepting Guest post
If you want to accept content from guests, you can do this directly with gravity forms, you set which field of the form is the post title, and the post content. Once the form is submitted the post can be directly published or left as a draft allowing you the site owner to vet the post before publishing. This is an easy way to add guest content to your WordPress site.
Business Equip are able to supply you with the development version of Gravity forms and are able to assist you with setting up the more complex forms. Contact us for more details.