Review: SimpleContact Pro - easy contact form creation and management

A couple of months ago Alex Hardy bought some advertising on this site promoting his simpleContact products. They're custom-contact forms with a focus on usability and he's just released simpleContact Pro 2.0.

Contact forms are a crucial element of most websites; whether it's a commercial venture or just a simple blog, the ability for people to contact you is pretty important. What Alex has done in building simpleContact is provide a PHP/MySQL solution for a very common problem.

What is simpleContact
Alex defines simpleContact Pro as the "complete solution for anyone whose time is too valuable to remake the basics every time. A snap to install and the job is done". It allows you to create a custom contact form and capture both correspondence and mailing list opt-ins.

Why simpleContact is seemingly a good idea
For bloggers it's important to ensure that you're capturing proper correspondence because responding to the right people can open doors for you and at the very least show that you're a real person. This makes it more likely for that visitor to return. For commercial ventures every single piece of correspondence could lead to a sale, so it's absolutely crucial that you capture their question in a professional manner. SimpleContact also allows you to capture opt-ins which means you can (with good conscience) add these users to a mailing list.

Installation
Once you've purchased simpleContact Pro (for only $25 I might add) installation is a fairly typical process for a PHP/MySQL application. You have to create a database for it (easily done through whatever control-panel your host uses) and enter the credentials into a configuration script. Once you've done this you can load any of the pages and it'll self-install (like Wordpress does). If you can install Wordpress you can install simpleContact.

Creating custom forms
There's a very simple configuration page for creating your form, allowing you to add/remove items until you have a form that matches your requirements. You can have a form stripped back to the basics (first name, last name and email address) or you can create a fairly complicated data-capture form. Most of the form fields are covered here, so you can create checkboxes, radio buttons, HTML areas, email address fields, mailing-list opt-ins... All with relevent validation in place to help ensure the quality of information you receive.

Integrating your custom form
Unfortunately there's not a lot of guidance when you want to integrate your form into your existing site; therefore I'd recommend Alex to offer more help and support to users as to how they integrated their newly created custom form into their existing website. Most users will want their contact form placed on their own site, branded and styled as part of their online presence and currently there doesn't appear to be much advice on this.

Having had a look through the code the contact.php script that holds the custom form has relative paths to included PHP scripts, so you can't simply drag the script to where you need it without modifying the paths. Your best options as far as integration are either moving the file and modifying the paths to the PHP files it requires (easily seen from the code), or simply calling the contact form in to your website through an iFrame. As always I wouldn't recommend using an iFrame - and maybe I've missed the point - but I couldn't see any detailed instructions for users to get their form integrated.

Custom form use and mailing list opt-in
The form created by simpleContact works nicely, I filled out some test data and submitted it. True enough the form keeps a record of the correspondence but it emails you to let you know too. You can also add email addresses to this announce list should you want more than one person to be made aware - which is a nice feature.

Auto responders and double opt-in
One of the nicest features about simpleContact is the ability to set up an auto-responder so that all correspondence is replied to with a personalised automated message. You can also use this as a double-opt-in for the mailing list, meaning that users have to click a confirmation link within the email before they're verified as being on the list. These are nice touches that you won't find on most comparable products.

Mailing list
While simpleContact doesn't offer you the ability to broadcast to your mailing list, it does offer you the mechanism to allow users to subscribe to it (through conventional single opt-in or enhanced double opt-ins). The functionality integrated into simpleContact is the ability to export your mailing list users in CSV format - which is pretty convenient because almost every email marketing application allows you to import subscribers as CSV. So it may not be an email marketing application but it does set you up nicely to port your data across.

Improvements
I apologise to Alex for being too overwhelmingly busy when the beta was out to put forward my comments but I do have a few items that I think could be improved in simpleContact Pro. Firstly it seems a little unusual to have first-name and last-name as compulsary fields on every form when simply "name" would have done, but that's probably just personal preference. Secondly I'm not sure what level of validation is used on data capture, because there isn't a captcha integrated into the custom generated form, so it's possible (as with all Internet forms) that spam-bots might abuse your installation. A sensible extension might be to integrate Akismet (or even a super-simple maths based captcha: "what is 2+2?" for example).

Conclusion
For $25 you can't go far wrong with simpleContact Pro. Alex also has a Lite version which is free but that's obviously less advanced. Fortunately you can try the Lite version and upgrade to Pro at a later date - which seems to be a fairly painless process. I'm pretty impressed with the level of customisation available with the form builder; I've used some hurrendous CMS plugins that aspired to similar things and all of them fell short.

SimpleContact works well and the only real hole the level of documentation explaining how to integrate your form into your current website. A captcha system might be an idea too, but if you need a more comprehensive contact form manager/builder for your website, I thoroughly recommend giving simpleContact a try (in either Lite or Pro flavour). Visit Alex Hardy's website for more information and downloads.

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