Background: Quality Distribution Inc. operates two warehouses, one of which is 500,000 sq. feet, providing warehousing and transportation services for many varied client needs. QDI required a detailed RFP form on their website which potential clients could fill out quickly and easily. This project also entailed updating their current website to better project the current capabilities of QDI.

The requirements for the form were quite detailed and included two pages worth of information to be gathered. Some information was dependant upon the users choice of a previous option so AJAX was obviously the solution.... unless you want to give your users a humoungous form to *look* at (as most wont bother to fill it out).

During my investigation I came across a company which offered a "builder" which produced and AJAX enabled form and the serice also provided a service to track various details about form entries, not just the data entered, for a very reasonable cost... down right cheap in fact.

I found the form designer to have a few drawbacks which I notified the service about (along with suggestions on correcting the problems) but overall the designer worked very well. I then tweaked about 20% of the resulting code to meet those requirements of my client which the services designer did not produce.

By approaching the solution in this way I was able to complete the project within a fraction of the time and cost it would have taken if coded by hand from scratch. This is one of the reasons I ensure that the tools and technologies used for a project are going to best meet your needs.

Screenshots:

Note: the expanded screenshot is not complete and font size was greatly reduced to get as much into the image as possible. If you would like to see or use the actual form it can be found on QDI's website.