As the administrator of several web sites for my businesses and for those of a few good friends, one trick I found to encourage repeat visits or to gather visitors’ opinions is to put some poll questions on the sites. These may be questions relating to our core businesses or just used for pure entertaining purpose. Examples of such polls can be: “How did you find our site?” “What do you think of our fast checkout lane?” or “Which movie should win the best picture award in the Oscars?”
By typing “poll widget” or “online poll” in the Internet search engine, you will find a long list of vendors that offer poll widgets. Many vendors allow you to create poll widgets for free (see a list of sites at the end of this article), but most of them do require you to register to get started or when you want to save your work. The free services are usually offered with certain limitations. Some allow you to enter a maximum number of choices, and others have limits on the total number of votes that can be taken within a certain time period. In other cases, you (or the voters) might have to view some advertisements. If you want to have services without such restrictions then you may need to sign up for the premium service.
Creating a basic poll is very easy. For the simplest polls, all you need to do is to enter the question and the answer choices-and that’s it! Some widgets only allow one question, but usually you can use two or more questions and put them into one poll. If you want a little more than the standard look and feel, you might wish to customize it with different skins-layout, colors and text fonts. Some vendors allow you to pick your layout from a set of pre-made templates and then customize from there. Others allow you to define your own through the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which gives you maximum control of the look.
Other than showing your poll body in plain text, poll widgets from some vendors allow you to display photos and graphics or even animations. These visual effects make the polls eye-catching and certainly bring the widget to another dimension. To create a poll with graphics, you will need to perform extra steps to generate and upload your graphics. Most sites will allow GIF (including animation GIF), PNG and JPEG files.
A most basic poll widget contains radio buttons. The choices are mutually exclusive; voters can pick just one answer from all the choices. A more advanced type allows for checkboxes, in which the voters can choose more than one item at a time. This comes in handy for questions such as what kinds of books people like to read, etc. A even more sophisticated poll widget supports the use of input boxes, which allow voters to enter any text. Text boxes can be useful if one of the choices is “others” or “none of the above.” Sometimes they can be used for gathering opinions or other answers that is not easy or even possible to be presented by choices.
Regarding presenting choices, there were quite a few occasions previously when I really needed to have a very long list of items for the choices-such as for voters to select a state. Having a poll with 50 radio buttons looks silly but it is really about the only solution I had found, until recently when I finally came across a free poll widget from a company called LetsPoll.com that offers pulldown menus. This must be a new site formed not long ago because I have never heard of them before. As far as I can tell, they offer theirpolling services totally free of charge and their poll widgets have by far the most advanced feature compared with any other site that I am aware of.
If you are more serious about the quality of your poll results, you may wish to prevent your poll from being taken by one voter multiple times or even by a computer script automatically. I am going to cover this topic in my next article. Until then, Happy polling.
List of some fine sites that offer free poll widgets:
Polldaddy.com
Vizu.com
LetsPoll.com
Micorpoll.com
surveymonkey.com
modpoll.com
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