How we shortened the software development time thanks to Form Carter – a simple library for customized contact form

Since 1971 when the first e-mail message was sent by Ray Tomlinson, this communication method is still the most popular form of contact between people. Therefore you can wonder why the e-mail address is not sufficient, and the contact form is perceived as an alternative option the website, web, and mobile app must-have.

Reasons for having a contact form

Your website software solutions should be user-friendly and create the best possible user experience. It’s essential to have tools for open dialog which can be also a great and free source of collecting leads that are able to turn into successful relationships with your potential clients. What else you can gain from implementing the contact form?

• it’s a good way to protect your website from spam
• contact forms look more professional than e-mail
• support UX
• make yourself reachable and easy to talk to
• more leads to work with
• automated responses which save your time

The way to reduce editing time of contact form

From a technological perspective, the implementation of the contact form is not a difficult task to do. The problem is about how to quickly make changes requested by the business.

At Software Things we base contact forms on simple and basic scripts, but every business requests to change some fields, extort us making changes on front-end and backend level. As we all know, corrections take time, and time is something every software development company wants to save.

As an ambitious and eager-to-learn team, we started looking for a value solution that would allow us to introduce corrections quickly and efficiently. The goal is worth the effort – we will save time for delivering the product, and the customer could ask for the necessary changes in the contact form.

Turn-key solutions

After deep research of what solutions are already available and their strong and weak points analysis, we knew we needed something more. After a few hours of brainstorming, the idea of Form Carter was born.

Form Carter was easy as possible and it was including modern features of PHP like strict typing. Using this solution allows us to save product development time quite significantly. Instead of editing the form from 3 to 4 hours, we will do it in 30 minutes.

Let’s validate our idea and make it an open source

We are the team that always looks for new, innovative solutions to make our resources even better. We know that doing it allows us to grow, and with us, our clients’ needs can grow as well. Thus several months of battle testing of Form Carter library had led us to a simple idea of making it the open-source.

What open source really is

Open-source software is a type of code that is made to be available for the public for free—anyone who is interested can go through this, change it, and use the code if it seems to be relevant and suitable. However, the most important characteristic of open source is the community that cooperates in a non-centralized way to build accessible solutions.

The open-source solution is also less expensive, more responsive, and lasts longer than proprietary solutions. The reason for this is the way the open-source is developed: by the community, and not by the single entity.

The open-source software has started to change into movement and the way of working, which suddenly became something more than software production. The way the people collaborate while developing open source solutions became a method to look for answers which can solve common frustrations and problems within the industry.

A new community event for open source

Our Form Carter solution was ready for validation of developers and we decided to host the hacktoberfest event at our office. We wanted to rethink our idea with the community of other specialists, hoping that collaboration will take our solution to a higher level.

The contributions of others made the technology jump to the next level. We have learned from each other a lot. It was our first test at this type of knowledge sharing and input made by the people has exceeded our expectations.

As a software company, we want to build the technological community and share innovative web and app solutions, especially if they are able to contribute to shortening the products development process.

We are pleased with the new experience and glad that Form Carter finally became the open source software. The knowledge and a successful result of workshops allow us to encourage others to use their projects as an open source, and as result, make the code better.

If you are interested in open source solutions for contact form, just check out our library of open source content, it’s stored on a GitHub.