Creating online forms can be intimidating. It took me a while before I got comfortable making a simple contact form; including form validation, submission to an email, etc.

It’s not impossible, but not exactly something you can whip out in a few minutes (Well, not me anyway). Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just make a form using some sort of drag and drop online application, and tell it you want certain fields to be required and have the data go to a specific email address and…and…

Well, say hello to Wufoo. Wufoo basically makes all of this stuff incredibly easy. Chris over at CSS Tricks, recently did a screencast giving a rundown of how Wufoo works and how to start using it. The video is about 28 minutes but worth the watch.

I have built several forms from scratch, used wordpress plugins, etc but will now be using Wufoo for ALL of my form creation. It simply cuts the time it takes to build a form in half and offers plenty of flexibility. If I need something truly custom I may resort to building it from scratch, but for everything else: Wufoo.

No, I am not getting paid by Wufoo to post this article (I Wish), I am simply in love with their application. Take a look for yourself, play with it. Tell me your thoughts. How do you create forms?

Let’s say you just got done designing a totally sweet web site for a customer. You show the design to them and they absolutely fall in love with it, but explain that they would really like to update the content themselves without having to call you all the time. You choke, cough a little and pretend you didn’t hear them, hoping they say something else. But no, they ask you again. “We would like to have the ability to edit text, images, etc. Can you build that into this design?”. You say, “yeah sure”, but dread the possibility of actually implementing such a feat.

Finding a good Content Management System (CMS) is pretty easy. Paul Anthony has a wonderful post including 13 free CMS solutions with reviews. However, finding a good CMS that fits nice and snug with a preexisting web template is another story.

In the past I had no problem finding the perfect CMS, plugging in a template and going from there, but doing things the other way around was next to impossible. It meant you had to dig through the CMS source code and somehow sync your design up with the original framework. Not fun.

Welcome to CushyCMS – The totally simple and easy to use CMS system that plugs right into your already designed web template. That’s right. Simply add a website to your CushyCMS account, provide some FTP info, add a couple classes to your HTML source code and your good to go. Kick back and relax, no more calls in the middle of the night for that critical text change.

Do you use a CMS? If so, what has worked for you?