Mar 10, 2011

Using Polls With Your WordPress Site

Polls are a very effective way to get feedback from your audience and as luck would have it it’s very easy to add this functionality to wordpress. I’ve played with several different plugins and my favorite is polldaddy so I’ll be using that in my example.

I’m not going to go over the installation of the plugin or the creation of a polldaddy.com account. I’m just going to dive right into to the usage of it.

Publishers tend to use polls in mainly two separate ways, displaying a poll on the front page of their site or displaying a poll within the context of an article. I’m not saying which way is right or wrong, in my experience sites that publish news content generally only receive 25-30% of their traffic from the front page of their site. The rest of the traffic is readers coming in through search engine searches and direct links to stories from referring sites, all of these readers would not see the polls.

By publishing a poll within the context of a story it’s much easier to come up with a relevant questions that pertain to the article you’ve written, where as if you post a poll two the front page of your site your might have to scrounge a little bit to come up with a generic poll for your readers.

The majority of polling plugins out there mainly only work well with in-story polling. Polldaddy however works well either way so the choice is yours.

Posting A Poll To The Front Page Of Your Site

To begin with login to the backend of your site
Next click on Polls in the left-hand sidebar.
Go ahead and click on ‘Add New’
Now you’ll be presented with a form that you can fill out to create your poll. The top field is where your question goes and then below that you have the fields to enter in your answers. If you require more answers then the default three just click on the add another button. If you want to remove some of the answer fields just click on the X on the right side of the field you want to remove.
Below your answers you’ll notice some check boxes. Multiple choice is for if you want to allow people to select multiple answers. Randomize answer order is just that it will display the answers to the poll in a random order. Allow other answers adds ‘Other’ with a blank field at the end of the answers if someone wants to write their own one in. Share this link adds an option to share the poll with others.
After that you can choose what you’d like the poll to look like, usually I’ll create a custom style and assign it as my default so I don’t have to worry about choosing one each time.
Now we have some options to choose how the reader sees the results of the poll and some ways to keep them from voting more then once
Once everything looks good just hit the ‘save poll’ button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
Now click on polls again in the left-hand sidebar. You should now see your new poll listed. Since we are going to be placing his on the front page you’ll want to hover your mouse over the title of the poll. You’ll see some options pop up beneath the title. You’ll want to click on ‘share-embed’
You’ll want to highlight the text in the field titled “WordPress Shortcode” and copy it.
Now click on appearance in the lefthand sidebar, then click on widgets
To initially create the poll you’ll want to click on the available widget named ‘text’ and drag it into the widget location where you want it to be displayed. Where this is is going to vary depending on the theme you’re using so it may require some experimentation.
Once you have your text widget in place go ahead and paste in the shortcode we copied earlier into the body of the widget. You can also put something in the title if you’d like such as “poll” or “weekly poll”, but it’s totally optional. Once that’s done just hit save and you new poll should be on your frontpage now.
Once you’ve done this all you have to do to switch out your poll with a new one is build a new poll using the steps above, but instead of dragging in a new widget just replace the shortcode in the existing widget with the code from your new poll.

Posting A Poll Within A Post

Posting a poll within a post will work exactly the same as the steps outlined above up until we get to the point where we click on appearance and get into the widgets.
Go ahead and create your poll then add a new post like you normally would and write your story.
Then position your cursor where you’d lke you poll to be inserted and click on the circle graphic next to your other upload/insert items
You’ll be presented with the add a poll screen now find the poll that you’d like to add to your story, hover over the title and click on send to editor, this will place the shortcode into your story and when you publish/update your post your poll will become live. (Note: you can also create your poll on the fly from the add poll window that is displayed in this step if you don’t want to do it ahead of time)