Podcasts are great to listen whether you are lying on the beach or stuck on the rush hour traffic. This episode of BizTech Podcast features JotForm. Check it out. BizTech Podcast is bi-weekly show designed to inform the small business and small business owner about targeted web sites and other technology.

We were also featured on the EdTech Weekly previously. EdTech is a pretty popular podcast for educators.

We have introduced a new product called “Full Membership Site Solution” last month and I am quite impressed with the amount of interest it received. We develop membership software that power thousands of web sites. So, we have been regularly receiving requests from our clients to not only provide the software but also to develop whole site for them.
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It is amazing how time passes by so quickly. It has been almost 8 years since the first version of Profile Manager Premium came out. At that time, I was still a computer science student. It all started with some free web site development I was doing for a non-profit organization. I was only doing it for fun but I also believed in the organization. I shared the scripts I developed on the web. Which lead to some small consulting gigs which lead me to post some more free scripts on the web. Two of the scripts I posted in 1999 became pretty popular among small websites. One was called “Netcard” and the other one was “Profile Manager”. They were both simple scripts which made it possible for small sites to easily let visitors create profiles on their sites. There was no term called “social networking” at that time. The biggest profile site was “Yahoo! Profiles” so most of the users wanted something similar to that.
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When we design software our goal is to make complex things easy for webmasters. So, we have to constantly think about the user interface. We sometimes redesign same functionality many times until we find a way that is easy to use but still flexible.

Today, we had another breakthrough idea on the new product we are working on. I define a breakthrough idea as one that make you say “how in the world I didn’t think of that before”. They are simple and elegant solutions to seemingly complex problems. Before we come up with an idea like that, we usually have a big mess. We are stuck and cannot find a good way out. We are almost ready to assume that there are no good solutions. We have thought of everything but the ideas we have are at best acceptable. They are not great. We don’t get excited when we think about implementing them. I think this is an important point. If we are not excited about what we are doing, we are probably doing it wrong.

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Just came back from my two weeks in Bodrum. I like doing some light reading on vacation. Business novels are especially go well under the sun since they are both enjoyable easy-reads and still can help you learn and grow.

The first business novel I read was The Goal couple of years ago. It was a great read and very thought provocative. After that I tried to find and read as many business novels as I can. Unfortunately, there are not many in this genre. I also did not find any web resources on business novels. So, today I am sharing the best business novels I have read. If you know any good ones missing below please feel free to post on the comments section.
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I am excited to announce that we have finally released JotForm 2.0. Since its first release more than a year ago, we have been constantly getting great feedback from hundreds of users. It seamed that JotForm really solved a need for webmasters: Creating web forms easily.

JotForm user base has been growing with an increasing rate and we now have about 28,000 users. More than 500,000 form submissions has been made and about 100,000 forms have been created. When I developed first version of JotForm, I had no idea it would be this popular. Basically, I developed it for our other product Profile Manager. Releasing it as a separate web based product was an afterthought. It was a lot of fun though. We even have made the final design on a ski trip in Killington, Vermont. We were skiing and snowboarding in the morning, and making the graphics and final design on the afternoon to the night. It was tiring like hell. But we had lots of fun.

JotForm 2.0 wasn’t that easy. My plan was to introduce a paid Premium version. However, I didn’t want to do this the easy way by restricting existing free features. Instead I preferred to develop an improved free version and create additional great features that would be worth paying for. I have been also too much occupied with other projects and customer support, and I couldn’t spend a great deal of time on this. So, the new version has been developed mainly by our talented developer Serkan. He has been very creative. He has come up with a web based Wizard UI that made things much easier for users to perform tasks without leaving the form builder. I don’t think anything like that has been done before. He also has developed a special JavaScript debugger called Tracer that makes JavaScript development easier and faster.

Here is a sample screenshot tour of our new wizard interface. On this sample, we will be creating PayPal Subscriptions integration to our form:

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Terri was a PM Premium user. She passed away in a car accident in 2003. She was a very passionate and warm person. She even once wrote a case study about PM Premium here. Her husband who took over their Wisconsin Dog Rescue site has sent me this announcement…
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Since JotForm has been released one of remarks I received often has been why we don’t have a regular homepage. You know, the common wisdom supposed to say a homepage should give some introduction. It is supposed to talk about what is the service is all about, why do you need it, how great it is. Things like that. Well, I don’t think there is much truth about this assumption. In fact, I think this is one of the biggest misunderstandings about the web users.

I see this mistake all over web all the time. Long registration forms to try some basic functionality, software products with no screenshots, community forums you can’t even read without registration. You expect the web users to trust you and invest their time. But, why should they do that? They just met you, and they are in rush. They are always in rush because they have been burned many times before by spending hours on sites like yours without getting anything accomplished. They are one second away from clicking that back button and you are expecting them to read your long mumbo jumbo and fill up that required occupation question and figure out those messed up CAPTCHA characters. Thank you very much!

If we look at the most successful sites today, there is something very common on all of them. They let you accomplish things.
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Until couple years ago, doing anything more than simple form validations or image mouseovers with JavaScript was considered drudging work. Not many people understood or appreciated this small but very powerful language that run on our browsers. It wasn’t even seen as a serious programming language. Fast forward to today suddenly it is the new cool thing. People are writing Drag and Drop User Interfaces that can edit graphics and save your data on the background.

So, what happened? This is very amazing. Today almost nothing has changed about the underlying technology but suddenly our thinking has shifted. JavaScript is not seen as a hack any more. People are now making very complex applications with it. JavaScript is not ugly any more. There are beautifully written libraries that can do powerful things. JavaScript is not a light language any more. The most exciting web applications written today use it extensively.
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Dennis Daniels is a teacher who believes teachers should stop pushing papers and start using web forms instead. He produced couple of training screencasts for teachers showing how to use JotForm. In these movies he creates questionnaires for students and shows how to collect data.

When technology becomes easier, everybody starts using it. A good example to this is the blogs. It is now very easy to have a blog. If you can manage sending and receiving emails, you can probably manage a blog as well. With services like JotForm, anyone can now create forms and collect data over the web. You don’t need to know HTML. You don’t even need a web site. If you have blog or email, you can create surveys or feedback forms and just post a link.