On today’s episode, we are going to talk about how to add Google forms to your Word Press website right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode 255. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin. And today, we are back in the studio after a week spending with my co-workers. We went to Park City, Utah for the Automatic Grand Meet Up. And we were there just hanging out, having fun with each other. We were learning as well.

I was in a project class on practical development, so I learned a lot about developing in PHP with learning about classes and methods and functions and all that good stuff, which I’m trying to still wrap my head around trying to figure out how I can make this into something that’s easy to consume and just help people learn how to develop within PHP. So that was a lot of fun. I just got back last night and still a little on the tired side. I’m trying to get my bearings straight and get everything lined up for this week’s worth of work and for this podcast episode, of course.

Now, I want to let you know and remind you about the webinar that’s happening on November 6. That’s happening at 12:00 p.m. Eastern. And it is going to be how to restore a site from back up. We’re going to be talking about how to restore our backup systems. And mainly, the one that we’re going to focus on is Back WP Up. That is one that I’ve had to try to explain before to people. And it’s like oh, this is really, really hard to actually describe and explain how to restore from a back up. It’s super easy to set up and configure and have that back up. But it’s really kind of cumbersome to restore that back up.

So I’m going to try to make that a lot easier and go through the steps and the processes that I would take to try to restore a site from a back up. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about in November. Again, that’s November 6. And you can register at Your Website Engineer.com/webinar. Also, I want to give you a reminder about the Word Press survey that’s out there. It is at the top of every Word Press.org page that you navigate to within the Word Press repository and whatnot. And it’s just the annual survey.

This one will take up to five to eight minutes in total, and it’s just trying to get information about how you use Word Press, if you’re a developer, how much you’re charging for Word Press, and all that good stuff. The data is anonymized. There is no email addresses or IP addresses will be associated with the published records and the results and whatnot. So just go ahead and do that. And then that will be part of the recap for Matt Melonwig’s State of the Word Address that will be happening at Word Camp US, which is the weekend of December 5 and 6. So that is about all that’s happening in the news.

There have been a few vulnerabilities that were found, and they were updated recently with Jet Pack and Akizmet. Those two plug-ins were updated real recently, so you want to make sure that you update those plug-ins as well. And in the is there a plug-in for that section, the one I want to talk about today is called Side Kick. And Side Kick is kind of a neat plug-in. And it is the fastest and easiest way to learn Word Press is what they call it. It’s real time, voice guided Word Press training and support right from your dashboard. And so this basically puts an interactive, real-time tutorials, basically, they’re walk throughs, and they put them right inside your Word Press dashboard.

There’s no more reading documentation or watching videos. You just click, you learn, and you do. And so Side Kick for Word Press comes with access to over 100 plus walk throughs at no cost, including Genesis, Woo Commerce, Yost, and more. And so you can create your own walk throughs and access your entire library by upgrading to the $5.00 a month plan. But there are some options within the free version as well, which is really cool. So you can, basically, when your client or your friend goes to their Word Press dashboard, there’s going to be a toolbar across the bottom. And you can just really go through and click and figure out how do I add a new post and how do I add a new page?

It’s all built in. It’s guided. It’s step by step. It looks like it would be a really good resource for people who are brand new to Word Press. So if you’re interested in installing Side Kick, head on over to the show notes for Episode 255. Or you can search for Side Kick in the Word Press repository. Today, we are going to talk about how to add Google Forms to our websites. And Google Forms is not my favorite way to add forms to our websites. But it is a really great way and a free and easily customizable solution to add to our Word Press sites. Now, I am a big fan of Gravity Forms. I’ve highly recommended Contact Form 7 as well.

But Google Forms, or the Google Forms within your Google drive and whatnot, those are another really good way to capture results. I can see this working out very easily for somebody who doesn’t really want to learn how to create a form. You can create them very easily within the Google ecosphere. Also, if you’re having tons and tons of results that you’re going to have to put into an Excel spreadsheet and filter them and look at all the results and whatnot, it would be a good idea to use Google Forms with Word Press as well. So to get started, what you need to do is you need to have some sort of Google Drive account, and that comes with every Gmail account, and it comes with Google Apps account.

If you don’t have either one of those things, you can sign up for free at Google.com and sign up for a free Gmail account. And you can do some really cool things with the Google forums. You can create surveys. You can do applications. You can do registrations, questionnaires. You can format your questions, and you can have people respond in just little text blocks or paragraphs or multiple-choice check boxes. They can choose from a list. You can actually use Google Forms to have people sign up for your e-mail newsletter if you wanted to do that. That wouldn’t be my top choice to use, but you could do that with Google Forms.

You can make drag and drop questions to make them easy to arrange them. You can even add images, custom text, You Tube videos, all that kind of stuff right within your form. There are some really cool things that you can do. And you can actually add some add ons to Google Forms and make your forms much more powerful. But the forms field, to build a form, that’s pretty easy. That’s Step 1. You build the form. And it’s fairly easy to do. There are not a lot of steps. And we’re not going to dive into all of the steps to do this. But it’s like how do I get this Google Form into Word Press?

Is there a fast and simple way? Well, the quick solution is you can use the embed feature. And you can just find this by clicking on file from the top menu. And then click embed, and then you can copy and paste that HTML code. And basically, what that’s going to do is it is going to do like it’s called an embed. But if you’re not familiar with how embeds work, it’s basically going to take all of Google’s stuff and then just kind of add it to your website, almost like you’re cutting it out of Google, and you’re pasting it right into your website. And it’s going to look exactly like it did inside of Google.

So it’s going to have the same Google look and feel. It’s going to have that Google logo down at the bottom. And it’s not going to be the best user experience. It’s going to work. It’s going to do everything perfectly fine. But I see one use case where this doesn’t really work well when you have a really, really, really long survey. Then when you hit submit, the Google form doesn’t refresh the page so that it goes back to the top of the page. So you refresh the page, and now, you’re in the middle of the page, and you just see this big, blank area. And you have to scroll back all the way up to the top to see the rest of your website.

So it’s not the most ideal solution to use. But there is a plug-in out there that will work for this. And it’s called Google Forms. And Google Forms is on the Word Press repository. There will be a link to that in the show notes as well. But it basically enables you to embed and manage your forms through the Word Press admin area. And it gives you more option for better Word Press integration and customizations compared to just embedding that HTML form. So how to get it. Once you’ve downloaded the plug-in and installed it on your Word Press website, then what you can do is you go to the section that’s called Google Forms.

It is going to be right above the appearance section within your Word Press dashboard. And you can go and you can go Google Forms, and then you say add new Google Form, and form submission. Those are all the options within there. So the Google Forms tab will let you see all of your forms at a glance. It’s very much like the all post, the all pages line up, you can see those. And then you can add a new Google Form. So now, let’s add a form to our Word Press site. So we’re going to use the add new Google Form button. We’re going to add it like we’re adding a new post to our website.

And then we’re going to go back to our Google Docs. So we need a couple of tabs open here. And we’ll go in, and we are actually going to click on the button that says send form button. It’s a blue button. It’s on the right corner or the bottom of the page. And then it’s going to pop up this box that’s kind of the Google Form details. And the first option is going to be the form URL box. We’re going to copy that, and we’re going to need that in just a second. So now that we’ve got that form URL, what we’re going to do is we go back to Word Press. And then we are going to save that form URL into the custom area for the Google Forms.

And that’s going to give us a perma link. It’s going to be something like Your Site.com/WPGforms/and then whatever the title is. And then you can customize that as well. Once you publish that form, it is going to give you a short code. And then that short code could be used to put it anywhere along your site. And so it’s kind of a unique way that you’re not actually just building the form. I guess you’re building the form in one area, but then you have to put it somewhere with the short code. So we can build as many forms as we want. We can integrate as many forms as we want.

And then we’re going to get a short code that’s a WPG form and then an ID with a number. And then you copy and paste that onto your contact page, your survey page, or whatever you would like it to do. The cool thing is when you copy that short code into another page or a post on your website, it is going to blend into your site. So if you’re using the 2015 theme, it’s going to pull in all of the different form custom styles from that theme itself, and it’s going to look like it’s a Gravity Form or a Contact Form 7 or something that’s built specifically into your website. So that’s really, really cool. That’s super awesome that it now looks like the rest of your website.

Now, what you want to do is, once you have this set up, you want to at least give it a try and make sure that it’s working. And so what you can do is you can fill your form out on your website. You click the submit button. And then you make sure that it takes you to your thank you page or your confirmation page. You want to see if you did allow people to receive email addresses, did they get that? Did you get an email depending on the way that you’ve configured it? And then what you can do is you can go to the form submission log. And what you can do from there is you can see the form being submitted inside your Word Press dashboard.

So you can see how many times people have actually submitted this. Or you can also go back over to your form in Google Drive and view all the responses there. And so if you do that, you can go to Google, and then you can go to the responses tab, and they’ll have little parentheses with the number or responses in it. And then you can do view responses. So you click responses and then view responses. And you’ll be able to see all of them in a spreadsheet form. So if you wanted to organize them or filter them or sort them in a certain order, you can do all of that from the Google spreadsheet view.
So it is a pretty neat solution. It is something that you’re integrating two different services with. But it does look like it’s one custom made solution. So you wouldn’t have to go out of pocket for the $39.00 license fee for Gravity Forms. You wouldn’t have to really try to learn how to configure Contact Form 7. You would just use something that you’re already used to, especially if you used Google to send forms to your co-workers before or you sent them out in an email before and got responses. This is a perfect way you can just embed this. And the experience is so much nicer.

I know that the embed, especially with the embed within Google, if you say that I only want it to be 400 pixels high, but your survey is actually 800 pixels high, then your visitors are going to have to scroll within the page of your website. So you’re going to have to have this weird double scroll bar that’s on the inside, which isn’t a best user experience. So you definitely want to check out the plug-in to add this to your Word Press website. Again, that plug-in is called Google Forms Word Press plug-in. Again, it’s a free plug-in on the Word Press repository. And it easily allows you to get up and running. They’re pretty new.

It’s not a very old plug in. But it’s got over 28 five star reviews and 1 four-star review. It’s got over 20,000 downloads. And so it is something that people are actively using. And it looks really cool. And I think it’s going to be a perfect solution for another crowd of people who are interested in adding contact forms or surveys or just trying to get more information. You could probably even use it for, I’m just thinking off the top of my head, all kinds of things no matter whatever type of information that you’re trying to get from your users or your visitors, you can go ahead and do that.

Now, I said earlier that you could use it for your email campaign newsletters. It would work for that. You could collect email addresses with that. But then you’d have to export them and put them into a mail [inaudible] [00:12:25]. So that’s not going to be the best option for sure. But you could do that. Or I do the end of the year survey. I could do it with Google Forms, and then I could easily filter the results. With Gravity Forms, what you have to do is, every time you want to look at them, you have to export them. But it’s not dynamic.

So once I export it once, and then 100 more people fill out the survey, then I have to export it again. And it’s just not as easy. When it’s Google, it will automatically refresh. If you’re looking at the form page, and somebody submits another response, then you’ll get that information right away. So that’s Google Forms and how to embed those on your Word Press website. All right. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. Sorry for a shorter episode this week.

It’s not really Word Press related. But this was the best topic I could come up with in the little bit of time that I had to prepare and get this thing recorded while my daughter is sleeping on my first day back to work. So that’s what I wanted to share with you. And definitely check it out if you are a heavy Google Drive user or Google Forms user. Remember about the webinar on how to restore a back up. That’s on November 6. You can sign up at Your Website Engineer.com/webinar. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care. Bye.