Imagine that same tire swing with 3 ropes attached to 3 different branches. That's what happens when a solution is over-engineered. It looses all its fun and ultimately all its appeal.

Google, for example, is elegant. Outlook, on the other hand, doesn't deliver on its promises.

This morning I found another good example of elegant software. But before I tell, I must first share a story…

In my free time I teach martial arts to children. The school is called Karate Kids (www.Karate-Kids.com ). Seven years old, the school now has over a hundred students and is barely contained at its original YMCA location.

Recently, we decided to grow the infrastructure for our existing students and to expand the program to new locations. To broaden the appeal to teens and adults, we changed the name to Smart Karate (www.SmartKarate.com ). To provide new features like guest lecturers and physical trainers, we moved the program from Nuuanu YMCA to McKinley High School. Several other locations are pending.

Here's the challenge. All the 'back office' work of accepting applications, collecting payments, and managing rosters was done the staff at the Y,. They did most of it the old fashioned way, by hand.

In true Geek spirit, and because pf our size and anticipated additional enrollment at the new locations, I wanted an automated solution offering online enrollment (I don't have time to process applications), monthly automated payments (I certainly don't want to chase open invoices!) and automated rosters (I would rather teach than create attendance sheets.)

The Solution:

For several weeks I scratched my head trying to figure out how best to do this, especially since I wanted a scalable solution to support more students and more locations. I could use PayPal (www.PayPal.com ) for the automated receivables, but it would cost $2,000 to program it to generate the rosters. I could subscribe to one of those canned solutions for martial arts schools but that would cost quite a bit over time and leave me with little autonomy down the road for customization. Or I could have one of my SuperGeeks create something from scratch but that would have taken months just to get it up and running.

And then this morning I found Wufoo (www.wufoo.com ) and I have been giggling with glee ever since. WuFoo's business model is based on the concept of forms. They believe all good things actually begin with some kind of form. So, they make it easy for the newbie to create online forms, e.g. contact forms, application forms, survey forms, invitation forms and much more.

But wait. There's more. WuFoo realizes that a really good form is actually a really good bucket. Efficiently and safely capturing the right info is really the most important step. Once you have the right info, you can then run just about any report. (They help you do that, too.)

And that's the beauty of WuFoo. You can easily create forms AND you can easily manipulate that data. That means you can easily send things like newsletters, opinion polls, and birthday greetings as well as collect feedback and track how people heard of you. I can even link PayPal to my forms and receive instant text messages to my cell phone when someone signs up.

Truly elegant. Check it out!



James Kerr is Chief Geek at SuperGeeks. He can be reached at www.SuperGeeks.net .