Webrequest is Web Forms Plus a Lot More

Forms in web pages is quietly becoming business as usual.

Google does a good job of hiding its Forms inside spreadsheets (?) but offers an interesting tool for sending questionnaires to people and recording responses in spreadsheets.

WuFoo offers and attractive alternative – it has lots of tools to build the questions and design the form, and some interesting color/layout and reporting options.

(In fact we just changed our registration form to a WuFoo form – until we have the new account creation software running).

They both do a good job (as do lots of others).  But they don’t offer the same functionality, flexibility, or integration as Webrequest

Horses for courses – nothing wrong with that.

And the more people using web forms the more comfortable they’ll be with the idea of Webrequest.

Our Webrequest probably doesn’t have the same ability to import addresses as Survey Monkey, won’t put the questions in an email like Google Forms, and doesn’t have the design options of WuFoo.

What it does do is allow the user to ask people in their address book whatever questions they want, and store the responses on the same page as all the other information they keep about the individual.

Everything we know about the person on one page!

The original concept of Webrequest came out of a conversation over lunch at Panera Bread back in 2006.  Gareth built the first version to help him survey the market for “Rails” developers, and it worked.

Subsequently we used it to select development partners, and marketing agencies, and collect information about our users.

One of our users, working on his own and faced with surveying a list of 1200 potential clients, used Webrequest to harvest the “low hanging fruit”.  He used Front Office Box to build the most comprehensive database of businesses in his market, and used Webrequest to ask a simple question “are you looking reduce your insurance costs?”.

The result was 70 new prospects (which doubled his client base) with no phone calls, and no travel.

Next up he used Webrequest to qualify these opportunities, embedding Webrequest in his sales process and figuring who was likely to buy, before catching a plane for his first meeting.

There are lots of businesses offering web forms now, but there’s only one integrating them as past of the “first call to referral” process.

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Searching, Spreadsheet, Survey Monkey, Web page