Putting a Registration Form in front of Downloadable Content

What are my options?

[jerzgirl]

We have a B2B website (apache server). Marketing group wants to put a form in front of a few of our downloadable (PDF) articles to collect contact details. I can describe what the front end workflow should be (i.e. what the visitor sees and what happens after they click). I realize that if we bought a marketing automation platform that this is part of what one would get access to, but we only have a plain old email service provider.

Do I need to hire someone who knows javascript to write the code or is there some free stuff on the web that I can check out?
Does anyone know of another solution rather than homegrown?

[lammert]

If these PDF files contain valuable information for the visitor which they could use to make their decision to do business with you or not, I would not put them behind a registration form. Most visitors will just hit the back button as soon as they are confronted with such a form when they only want to download a PDF.

After all it is the visitor who decides to spend money on your products/services, not the marketing department.

[jerzgirl]

Thanks for your opinion lammert. Nevertheless, I still would appreciate hearing from anyone who can answer my question.

[rocknbil]

jerzgirl, you need a programmer on board. Plain and simple. Even a novice programmer would have a quick answer, and would recognize the technical fallacies with this:

What's to stop the first user from logging in with phony info and emailing everyone the link or bookmarking it?
What will you do to prevent this from happening so it's at least partly protected as a download?

The way this would be done is with a simple form and distribution of a random, expiring, non-bookmarkable URL. Better yet, the form submission has to be reviewed before distribution.

Both of these will be barriers if it's to collect business leads, and your marketing department will be committing career suicide for your company if this is the case - and they need to know it.

On the other hand, if it's info that is not meant to collect leads, it may be justified, and you need a programmer. The language doesn't matter, Perl, PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, whatever, but Javascript is not what you want. You need a server side language.