Polls are a great way to solicit opinions, and add some community to your site.
With a poll, a user can just click a button to give you their two cents. Meanwhile, it takes a lot more effort to leave a comment. Which do you think your readers prefer? While comments allow them to say anything they want, polls enable a quick multiple-choice response (which can be very useful). Also, I’ve found that blog posts with attached polls tend to generate more comments.
Once you decide you need a poll, you need to actually add one. You have plenty of choices for implementing your poll. Here are a few of the better services/scripts:
Hosted Solutions
- PollDaddy – A cool-looking AJAX poll. There are several styles available, as well as custom CSS.
- Toluna (formerly dPolls) – A poll service with a bunch of social-networking-style features tacked-on.
WordPress Plugins
PHP (AJAX)
- FPoll – A simplistic polling script with an admin panel for easy poll management.
- AJAX Poller – Customizable, and has an animated graph for the results.
