Wheres the Styles?

I just bought GF after being a long time CForms user. I was hoping for more form functionality and ease of use.

On installing it everything seems pretty slick, except I don't see any way to select or change form styles.

I know I can manually code CSS style, but did I really just pay nearly $100 for a form plugin that has no built in form styles and no way to change the way it looks without manually changing code.

This is a basic feature that even free form plugins offer. It's nearly inconceivable to me that a paid form plugin has no style editor or user selective styles. Is that plain text box form all we get?

Am I missing something that's right in front of me?

This is really disappointing. GF is selling this as a user friendly form system and it lacks basic design functionality? I don't want a plain form. Now I'm back to manually coding form design. Most people are not even capable of doing their own CSS, which gives them a plain form system that they paid for.

GF sells this and it's promo video shows elegant form styles and suggests simple setup. Admittedly it does not say there's a style editor, but at this cost and with the way GF is touted as being easy and elegant I certainly feel misled.

I realize there are lots of back end features and those look pretty impressive. But design is such a critical competent to getting good conversions. That it was neglected in GF is a huge lack and frankly I find it inexcusable. This is not a free plugin. It's an expensive paid system that should work out of the box.

I'll dig a little deeper and as I do understand CSS, perhaps I'll do some customization. But it's not likely I'll be recommending this to anyone until it has a proper design editor. It's so tacky that basic design was left out of this. It's a bit like selling a car with amazing features, except it comes with no starter.

Near as I can tell the forms are not inheriting any style They're just generic form boxes with essentially no style. I guess simple is good. But I feel like what you're really saying is GF didn't want to develop a proper style editor, so you gave us no options other than manually making a design and use inhered styles as an excuse.

What I was hoping for /expecting was a visual style editor. I figured that would be standard is something this expensive. Perhaps it is picking up colors and the like from my theme. But the ability to style is essential. We need options for things like how fields are spaced, where the text is, whether the form corners are rounded.

It's like you've done all this great work on the backend and totally ignored the style, which is equally important. I'm left back to manually designing my CSS. Thankfully I know how. Most people don't and are stuck with whatever GF gives them because there are NO options for designing your form our way.

I'm really hard trying not to go off here, but that I even have to explain this is crazy. Often the most basic of free plugins have options for styling, colors etc. Other free form plugins at least loaded with themes. Yet GF, which boasts itself as being the form maker to beat all form makers does not? I took GF marketing and price seriously and I expected to not only make powerful forms but ones that looked amazing.

I'll dig in a little deeper and try to design something manually because the back end of GF looks great, but I certainly feel frustrated at having paid more for a plugin than I EVER have before and finding it lacking such a basic feature. It's like I got half a plugin. I can't even imagine how you could make excuses for no design functionality.

Please don't act as if I'm out of control on here because I'm disappointed with this lack. It is a legitimate lack and a serious one. And there is no better venue to voice concerns than a public one. You can't truly have an easy to use top of the game form system that has no styles or editor. Inherited styles are a start, but lack because they don't give control.

For example the fields in my case are way far apart, there is no control of cell width etc. Most people do not have the needed skills to change this in CSS. You tout these things as being simple customizations. For most they are not simple at all.

You are offering a tool that costs a lot of money and in the plugin world we're used to things like visual editors, styles and themes even on free tools, much less paid ones. Design should never be put on the back burner. It's key to getting great conversions and responses.

What would really knock this out of the park is a drag and drop styles editor where we would control every facet. With the strong feature set already inside GF, that would truly make GF worth the price tag.

In any case I appreciate the responses and hope this issue is corrected in the future. I appreciate you not trying to censor feedback. That always fails because the next response to that is twitter feeds, Facebook pages and even more public places. The fact that you have a venue for this dialogue is commendable.

Gav