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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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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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.

Launching a new site is always fun and exciting. You put a lot of hard work on something and have that great feeling of accomplishment. At the same time there is that scary feeling that something might go terribly wrong. And it sometimes really does happen.

My worst war story was TheCounter launch on the post bubble days. The site had over 2 million free users and our company, mostly depending on advertising model, was bleeding for cash. We had to turn it into a paid site. However the code was impossible to change. Written on pre-PHP days, it was implemented as an Apache C module and had HTML code all over the web server code. If you wanted to make a word bold on a page, you had to recompile Apache and restart web servers on three machines.
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I am very excited to announce that the first web based WYSIWYG form builder JotForm BETA is now released. Try it yourself.

Completely Free!
JotForm is currently completely free. It will stay this way during BETA period. I must admit I have not decided on a business model yet. The most possible outcome will be a Pro version where users will get more benefits. At this point I am more interested in seeing the interest in this tool, collecting feedback from users and weeding out all the bugs.

Easy Try Out!
You can try it out without creating an account. Hey, if you only want a tool to create form source code for you, just create your form, get its source without even creating an account on the JotForm site. You will not even leave the homepage! It is probably one of the easiest ways to create forms.

But Can It Collect Data?
Although implementing the first real web WYSIWYG form editor was a very interesting task by itself, it is not that useful. All form building tools on the web provide data collection and access. So does JotForm. It is really easy to see results on the my forms section and you can even export them as Excel, CVS or some other delimited format. You can also receive notification emails.

Tools, tools, tools
JotForm is built on top of two super cool JavaScript libraries Prototype and Script.aculo.us. The server end is built using PHP and Mysql. Currently completely empty and lonely Forum runs on phpBB. Please if you are reading this go post a feature request or an angry bug report. The graphics are done on Photoshop and tour movies made with Camtasia Studio.