Hello, Nation!

This is the first installment of “Application Nation”.  Application Nation is essentially an excuse for me (I’m Sean, marketing guy for Hosting Nation) to talk about all the new tools and tips we find and share them with the Nation (that’s everybody else). Sometimes we’re using the tools in-house, sometimes we just stumble across them.

This week I’ll be looking at Icebrrg, an automagical form creator from Element Fusion.

The last few weeks have been extremely busy at Hosting Nation, as we’re shopping for a new design for our site (among other things like a logo design, building the knowledge base and support system, dealing with current development projects and trying the Sushi place down the street – great Sushi is a key component of high productivity.)

As we were looking at other designs to get some inspiration, we crashed into an Icebrrg (I promise, no more Titanic references).

Icebrrg is a project by Element Fusion, a design and development company out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma specializing in Web 2.0-ish, gridified design (exactly the type of design we’re looking for, BTW)

Overlooking their other projects at the moment, I was particularly intrigued by Icebrrg.  From the Icebrrg website:

Icebrrg lets anyone easily build online forms for websites and blogs — no programming, software or special skills needed.

Well, everybody says their product is easy to use, right?  If they said it was super complicated, nobody would use it.  I looked around the site, and they do have a free version called “dinghy”, so I decided to give it a whirl.

From registration, to form completion, to placing the output code on our website, to putting it live, testing the form and receiving a response took a grand total of – are you ready?  Six and One Half minutes.

Yep – you heard me, six and one half minutes, I could barely believe it myself.  I’m no developer (truly, ask Erik and Randy, our in house developers, they’ll tell you), I have limited HTML and CSS experience, and no time to mess around with something overly complicated.  That’s what makes this tool great for small businesses with a limited budget.  You need to talk to your clients now and not pay through the nose – and this tool lets you do it quickly and easily.

Want to see it in action?  I knew you would, so I’m going to build a form and post it so you can see for yourself how easy it is.

The first thing to do is sign up for an account. It’s a simple form, requiring very little in the way of personal information – something I like, as I think software companies often build applications for the purpose of getting sign-ups and mining data.

If you want to play along, you can sign up for your own free Icebrrg account here:

As they say on the site, chillingly simple so far. Once you’ve signed up (I chose the free “dinghy” account), dive right into creating a form. With the free version, you can have up to three forms running. You don’t get any data storage, but if you need to get up and running it’s a pretty good option.

To create the form, it’s as simple as clicking on the field you want from the left menu and it’s added to the form layout. By clicking on the form field, you can customize the fields and perform a few extra features.

If this is a temporary form, I suggest something very simple.  Name, email address and maybe a captcha to limit spam.  Of course, you can use up to 10 fields per form with the free account including address, phone number and more.  Depending on your business model, you may want to develop several different forms to try and raise conversion levels.  Once you’ve figured it out, click save & exit.  You’ll be taken to an admin screen with a few choices for your form.

The choices are pretty self-explanatory. View and Edit allow you to manipulate or preview your form.  Browse and Download allow you to respectively browse through your contacts on the web, or download them as a .csv or .xls file.  Share allows you to get the code in an iframe for embedding it into your site, or to embed the code on it’s own page as I’ve done here.

Altogether, the whole process takes less than 10 minutes and you’ll have a contact form up and running on your site. For a short term solution, Icebrrg is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.

Sean Enns is the Director of Marketing and Communications for Hosting Nation Data Inc.  Hosting Nation provides hosting packages and hosted applications to everyone.