Collecting even simple responses on your Web site still requires some programming skills, like

• An HTML form needs to be generated [HTML and CSS]
• user input has to be validated, best on client and server side [JavaScript and JSP or PHP]
• and eventually the collected data needs to be aggregated, sliced and diced. [SQL]

I recently discovered formassembly, a service offered by Veer West LLC, based in Indiana, which claims to help with all the required tasks. Let's walk through them ...

Form Design

To test the Web application, Tom and I created a simple feedback form for his PodCast: The Tech Weekly PodCast

An easy to use but still powerful all web based form builder makes form generation easy and fun. First, one has to write the text that makes up a question and subsequently select an answer-type, like text, options, radio-buttons, checkboxes, even file upload is among the choices. Secondly, one can setup triggers, conditional questions, calculations, and advanced presentation styles.
At any time, a preview of the form can be displayed, which makes the design and setup process less of a guessing game.

Publishing

Formassembly offers several different ways to put the form on the Web:

• Formassembly hosts the form on their server.
  Our test form for instance is available on their servers here: http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/5850
• The HTML for the form can be downloaded and integrated into a web page.
  This link for instance can be used to download the HTML code that makes up the form: http://app.formassembly.com/forms/export/html/5850
• Server-side script can be used to retrieve the form via a REST URI.
  This link can be used to retrieve the form markup via an REST call: http://app.formassembly.com/rest/forms/view/5850
• Server-side script can be used to retrieve the form via an XML URI.
  This link can be used to retrieve the form markup via an XML API call: http://app.formassembly.com/xml/forms/view/5850

Getting to the form markup via REST allows merging the form's HTML code into a regular web page on the hosting server, which is significantly different and better than letting the consuming browser perform the merge, which happens for instance with Google and Amazon ads.
In case the form needs some modification later, Formassembly amazingly offers simple but effective revision management.