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22 Nov 2018

Website Startup Plan adds Form Builder

We introduced Form Builder over a year ago and improved its anti-spam functionality earlier this year. Until now, none of this functionality has been available on our Website Startup plan. 

We've been listening to the feedback from both partners and subscribers. One of your biggest gripes is spam coming from your contact us forms. Due to the intricacies of how forms work in Evance, we couldn't apply a blanket update for Website Startup plans using our "basic forms". Well, not a reliable one. 

Basic forms have been in Evance since day dot. Whilst they were good from the outset, it soon became clear we needed something better. Form Builder addressed a large number of problems we had with forms and your control over them. But, the development of the Form Builder was big and expensive so we excluded it from our most basic plan. We admit it, we were wrong and we're sorry.

Added features

From today, we'll enable subscribers on the Website Startup plan to add a General Form to your website. Bringing Website Startups into the Form Builder ecosystem means you'll benefit from:

  • Control over your form fields and their arrangement without the need for a developer.
  • Access to Google invisible ReCaptcha to help prevent email spam (requires a Site and Secret Key from Google). 
  • Optional GDPR updates to allow visitors to accept your ePrivacy Statement
  • Control over the "Thank you" email sent to your website visitors
  • Alerts of form submissions in your control panel in case you missed them in your email.

Limitations

Yes, unfortunately we had to impose a few limitations, but don't worry, if you're site has a "basic form" these should not affect you detrimentally.

  • Website Startup plan includes the ability to add one General Form only.
  • The admin notification recipient for completed forms is limited to the Account Owner.
  • Form completion options such as custom website thank you message blocks or page redirects are unavailable. 
  • A small number of field types are unavailable.
  • Access to Quizzes, Polls or Registration Forms are not permitted.

The limitations imposed do not affect the vast majority of our subscribers as they reflect the limitations of "basic forms". Adding these limitations ensures we can differentiate between plans whilst also delivering additional functionality to all subscribers. 

The future of forms

Our long-term strategy is to remove "basic forms" from Evance completely and to centralise all form functionality into the Form Builder. It'll make our lives much easier and your lives much better. To ensure all websites continue working, there are no immediate plans to remove "basic forms" from Evance in 2018, nor in the first quarter of 2019. We'll be giving subscribers plenty of notice before we do.

We hope this means all subscribers will now enjoy the efforts we put into new Form Builder updates. 


  Tagged as : Features and Updates