Forum Moderators: phranque
I am wondering how much it would cost for someone to setup an online application. The rest of the site is built and has no problems, I just need an online application, that when it is submitted, I am able to print it off looking exactly the way it did when the clients were filling it out.
So again where would I find someone for this and how much should I pay(estimate of course).
Thanks in advance,
Hal
PS: The application is only 1 page and is very simple.
To expand a little, it's simple to set up a form and process the input using a free script. If you want any kind of formatting or ordination of the input data, this becomes a bit more complicated. Free scripts easily order alphabetically, some can even be configured to output in a specified order. But if you want something deceptively "simple", like
First name Last Name (on one line)
Address
City, State, Zip (or will it be international province/post code?)
Someone (a programmer) is going to have to get their hands dirty. Take the city/state example: logically if there's a state and it's U.S., you don't output province or postal code, and vice versa. Programming this so it outputs gracefully and consistently isn't rocket science, but it's not as easy as it looks.
Then there's error checking, and how you manage it. Do you allow (and force) country selection from a drop-down list, or allow them to enter US, USA, U.S., or United States into a country field? What happens if they typo?
Many free scripts will error check for the presence of required fields, but what about formatting? For an email field to be valid it has to follow a specific format.
Another is the skill level of your programmer and the things they will need to do to prevent the form from being abused by spammers and protect security.
These small examples give you an insight to how complicated or simple it can be. So again, it depends on what you're looking at.
I will add one last thing you need to be aware of:
I am able to print it off looking exactly the way it did when the clients were filling it out.
Print it from what mail program? What printer, resolution? Will the output exceed one page? Need company header on it, reference (invoice, job, task) numbers? These are also variables a programmer may not be able to control. It's bad enough trying to make it format correctly with various browsers. We can see the results of those. The mail program output and your printer is a hidden environment, your programmer is basically shooting in the dark.
Don't let this scare you, it can be done (it's one of the things I do weekly.) But as for cost and viability, these are the points you need to consider.
