It’s long been a fact that when designers and developers work with clients, the best results come when the client is willing and able to provide the most information about their project. Creative Republic offers a great selection of free and paid document templates, but it concerns me that a web-based project questionnaire is still operated through offline forms. It appears that even with the wide variety of form design tools available, there is still nothing perfectly suited to the web design and development industry.

There are a lot of designers and developers creating their own custom online ‘project questionnaires’, and they are most prevalent in the XHTML to CSS industry. It is a huge gap in the market then that there is no service out there to create this forms at a much lower price and potentially without losing any flexiblity. Charging a monthly fee like some form design applications on the web would be one option to make a profit, with users getting their own hosted form and their results stored for them online. The other option would be to sell individual licenses where the user can install the form on their own site and process their own form results. Additional revenue could be made from an advertising assisted free version or even a payment processing module where a small percentage is kept.

Here is how I envisage a typical form:

Sample 'Project Initiation Form'

As you can see it is divided up into clear stages and each stage has it’s purpose. What a form designer would offer is not only the ability to have standard templates such as this, but also the ability to allow users to add their own stages and fields to gather as much or as little information as they wanted from their client. This flexibility would allow it to be adapted to almost any type of web (or other) service.

It remains to be seen whether this would be a popular service, but as with all my other posts, I feel this idea has great potential with such a huge target audience and the lack of any real competitors in the market.

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