I've mentioned before how online services make capturing data from websites much easier than in the 'old' days, but if your needs (and resources) are more modest, then Google Docs' form and spreadsheet tools are an even quicker and easier way to collect data from your website.
Since the tools are free, put no limit on the number of submissions and require no software to be installed on your website, Google Docs are a great choice for creating forms like "Contact Us", RSVP's or even for simple polls and surveys.
Forms can span multiple pages and contain fields such as text (short and paragraph), multiple choice, checkbox, scales, grids and lists. It's easy to create forms and you can you can play around with them to your heart's content, moving fields, editing supporting text, changing themes and so forth. It's very intuitive and Google does all the hard work so you don't have to. You can opt whether fields are compulsory, though you don't get advanced or custom validation of email, postcodes, account numbers etc., but it's probably more than enough for most people's needs.
The main downside is that you don't get much control over the formatting of the form. Forms include references to Google and you are limited to one of 95 themes (you can't create your own), although if you really want to, you could embed the form within your own web page and use CSS creatively. Here's a simple example I created to show a friend. Notice how you get to write the title, introduction text, plus title and subtitles of each field.
And here's the underlying spreadsheet, with details of a couple of tests that I submitted.
I won't bore you with the details of how to actually create a form, as there are plenty of resources on the web (here's help from Google). What I will tell you though, is how to get an email sent to you when people fill and submit your form, as it's not obvious.
Create a new form (if you haven’t done that already) in Google Docs and close the window. Now open the corresponding spreadsheet in Google Docs and choose Share > Set Notification Rules. Select the "A user submits a form" option and how frequently you would like to get notified. If it’s a "Contact Me" form, the "email right away" may be a good choice but for polls, you may use the daily digest feature.
Amazing what you can get for free, isn't it?