User input via a form

[nomis5]

I'm looking for a company that provides a service which will allow me design a form (no technical knowledge needed) which will accept user input and images. The software emails me that a form has been completed and I can then access the content of the form and publish parts of it on my site.

It's a cooking site and I want my users to be able to send their recipes to me. I think I've found a couple of providers of this service but would appreciate any advice / recommendations. Thanks in advance.

[piatkow]

I would only bother with a third party provider if using a cut price hosting service that didn't support PHP. Even then check if your host provides the service.

Otherwise there are plenty of free PHP scripts around that do not require programming knowledge to set up.

[wheel]

Yep. per piatkow. There's plenty of 'services' that provide this on a monthly or per view service but I wouldn't do that. Either work your way through a free service, or failing that, see if you you can find a local webdesigner that'll do this for you. It is not a big job to set up, and I think you'll be better off if you 'own' it rather than outsourcing the service.

Just determine ahead of time what questions you want to ask and what the possible values are. Turning that into a form, and then emailing the form to you is straightforward for any pro web shop.

[nomis5]

Thanks for the advice, it helped to weigh up the options.

I have to admit I didn't take it though. I opted for an £18 p.a. service which has captcha, stores the messages for 13 months, has anti-spam features etc. Those all seem essential to me and at £18, and given my very limited technical abilities, seemed the way to go. There was a free service but it had ads on it.

With some php knowledge, maybe I would have designed it myself, but then again, it took me less than an hour to set the whole thing up as it is now.