ONLINE FORMS AND TOOLS

What companies (or methods) are people using for your online planning forms and/or tools. I've been testing out DJ Intelligence. For those not familiar, they have tools that you can incorporate into your site like Availability Checker, Booking Form, Online Payment Gateway and Planning Forms per Event type. The forms are customizable and one nice thing is your customer (including their guests can choose specific songs from their large database and the song choice imports into your form. One thing I didn't like is that they let you test drive the tools for free but only the Pro version so you spend all this time working with their tools to customize them, find what works for you etc and then when the trial is over if you'd rather use Standard pricing you lose all of your branding, the links get routed differently, you lose your custom url etc. They basically take away a lot of important aspects (that you've never really seen and therefore don't know how they will look or how the links will work...You've never used the Standard version). In any case, I'm looking at alternatives, particularly for:

1. an Availability Checker that doesn't show all the dates you are free or not but rather if someone inputs a date, it simply says if it's available or not. (this is how the DJ Intelligence one works. It's nice because for someone starting out it doesn't hang out a banner making it overly obvious that you don't yet have a lot of bookings yet)

2. Planning form that can be customized. My main goal was to have a form (like DJ Intelligence) where the customer can fill out the form, save their progress, and come back to it as needed.

I'm trying to do something other than just a fill-able Word form etc. I looked into DJ Intelligence because I was wanting to have something that looked good from a presentation standpoint. If there is even an app that can be embedded into my website that works well, I'd be open to that too.

I should add that I'm also going to look at DJ Event Planner. Anyone use this? Do you like it? Pros? Cons? What plan do you have and why?

Other suggestions?

rickryan.com said:

If you're just starting out, I'd far prefer to have all availability checks coming in to me so I could see how many inquiries I'm getting. Especially at first it's better to be more hands-on and in personal touch than to have a website screening out for you. As for the documents, I use Google Docs. It's easy, very effective and I'm not locked down to a specific format. The bride can re-arrange as much as she wants and it has an easy way to share with multiple people as well as tracking on all changes made.

Click to expand...

Are you using the Personal or Business Google Docs?

This also brings up another concept regarding tools. I have been thinking about a better, more professional way of doing song requests in real time. I had thought of having an app (or something) embedded into the Home page of my website to where people at the event can simply go to the site on their phones , make their request and it notifies me of upcoming requests in order as they come in (via email or better yet via a pop up window that just keeps adding songs in the que). Karafun sort of has a similar feature for karaoke. Anyone do something similar? Or does DJ Event Planner have that capability. I see that they have a way of allowing guest and bride/groom to make requests (prior to the event) but didn't know if they can do something in 'real time'