Do you want to add polls to your site?

October 20, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Web Services, WordPress 

I have been thinking about adding polls and surveys to some of my sites, but haven’t had the time to research how to do it best.

Serendipity favored my efforts this morning when I read on Matt Mullenwag’s blog that PollDaddy Goes Automattic.

He announced that all the blogs hosted on WordPress.com now have PollDaddy features enabled and a new plug-in for WordPress has been released.

I just installed the plug-in on this site and this is my test post to see how well it works.

It took only a few minutes to sign up for free at PollDaddy.com and set up my profile there.

I have been wanting a way to create polls and surveys and to show them on my websites and blogs. Creating a poll with PollDaddy is very easy and there are several ways to link to your poll and/or embed it in your site, including javascript, a direct link, and a tag to use with the WordPress plug-in.

Here’s my first test of using a PollDaddy poll using the plug-in:

This is just a simple poll asking if you are a Squidoo lensmaster. It allows comments and I chose to moderate the comments before they are published.

I’m sure I’ll come up with better polls in the future, but I really love Squidoo and I like meeting new lensmasters and catching up with all the lensmasters I already know.

One thing I’m seeing that I don’t like is how the format of the poll changes as my blog page loads. At first, the answers are neatly lined up, but after the page loads completely, they change and no longer line up.

Are you seeing that, too?

It looks, to me, like I’m having a CSS conflict between this poll and one of the widgets I have on this blog.

You can compare what the poll looks like on this site with what it looks like on the PollDaddy site: Are you a Squidoo lensmaster?

Have you wanted to add polls and surveys to your sites and blogs? What tools are you using to accomplish this?

Act on your dream!

JD

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