Creating a contact form is easy in Google sites, it doesn’t require any knowledge of GET/POST requests and messing around with php and forms.
So let’s begin! Go into Google Documents. Lets create the form, Go to ‘Create New > Form’. It’s really straight forward here, you have a few options at the top. (Yours might look a bit different as I am doing this within a Google App environment)
Allow users to edit responses; you probably don’t want that.
Requires Google Account sign-in to view the form; the person filling in the form requires to be logged into a Google account
Automatically collect respondent’s Google Account username; If you would like to know who sent the form, check this option, otherwise the sender of the form will be anonymous.
You can give the form a name, and some text/info that will help people fill it out.
In the beige box is where you can create questions. Put something in the Question Title and Help Text is required. There’s a few options for Question Type:
- Text, Paragraph Text, Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, Choose from a list, Scale, Grid
- Text; one line of text.
- Paragraph Text; many lines of text
- Multiple Choice; choose one out of many choices (and add ‘Other’)
- Checkboxes; choose many out of many choices (and add ‘Other)
- Choose from a list; drop down box of choices, simliar to multiple choice (however no ‘Other’)
- Scale; on a scale on 1-10, how awesome is my site?
- Grid; make a table/array of your choosing.
You can also make this a required question to be answered. It’s good to get data from a form, so check this unless you don’t necessarily need data from that question. Once you have finished, click ‘Save’ on the top right. Your form is completed.
What the form does is create a dynamic spreadsheet that fills with data that users have filled in the form. Lets have a look at the spreadsheet, it’s also useful if you would like to be notified when a user submits a form as you need to set that option up here. To set up the notifications; click the down arrow next to ‘Share’ on the top right, and go to ‘Set notification rules’. It can be a bit tricky to find, but it should come up with this.
Lets make it so this form will email me when someone submits something on the form. I would do this by checking the ‘Any changes are made’ and ‘Email – right away’. ‘Save’.
Note: You can go back and edit your form by going to the ‘Form(x) > Edit Form’ on the spreadsheets bar. The x is the number of responses, so it’s normal to see 0 in there if you’ve just created the form. By default, this form is ‘Accepting Responses’ which you can turn off if you no longer want to accept responses.
Now, we want to insert this into our google site! Lets load up our google site now (with the assumption you can make page edits)!
So on your page, edit the page and insert. You can do this by click the ‘Edit page’ on the top right, then click ‘Insert > Spreadsheet Form’, then find the name of your form which you just created. It’s that easy.
Enjoy your form!
