Check out SIS Survey if you have a need to poll your readers or users. This is a very robust system that lets you create free surveys.
Polling is a very important operation for finding out what large groups of people are thinking. There are pretty graphs and statistical reporting after you get your survey going. You will find a test survey linked to from this post. I did not want to embed it into the post as it has been known to cause issues with our friends ingesting MakeUseOf via RSS. So anyways”¦
Let’s take a look at SISSurvey and see what it is all about.
When you arrive at the site you will be greeted with a page asking you to either sign up or take a tour. Please feel free to do so and follow along with us:
After checking out the limitations with the free account to create a free survey, I thought this will work for me! I could only have 100 people answer a survey and I could only have 100 maximum surveys. No big whoop! So off I went to create my free account like so:
After filling in the form I found the portion of the page that lets you create a free survey. I clicked where it says Click Here to create one directly under where it says there are no polls created at present. If you have surveys already created they will be displayed under the My Latest Surveys section a little further down. This is how you can see responses.
Now let’s fill out our first poll. What to ask? What to ask? Oh I know! How about How awesome is MakeUseOf.com? So I typed in my question in the top. You have a 160 characters maximum. Then I typed in all my answers and checked all the check boxes that give you the option of letting users choose multiple options, randomizing the answer locations and the option to choose and type in an other response.
You have more options on your right including filing folder, close date (this is the day your survey will end), you can block users from answering the survey from the same IP address more than once and finally you can install language packs.
There are a bunch of styles for you to choose from. After you select the style on the left you will see a preview of it below. Select your style or create a custom poll style from their new advanced custom poll editor. I opted for the easy way and choose the grey plastic standard template. It looks pretty cool.
I was ready to take my own poll! They hit you with a direct link to your survey as you can see mine below. Here is the actual link. Please click on over and if you are one of the first one hundred respondents let us know what you think of our wonderful website – with of course no bias 
This is what the plastic theme looks like and how my survey turned out. For you webmasters you can click on the embed java or flash links on the right of your link to install this on your blog or website .Other users will be happy with a web URL that takes you to their survey.
After you vote you will see the following screen and results:
And if you try and be sneaky and vote twice”¦ they are already on to you!
We also found the reporting graphs and tools to be very very nifty
What do you use for polls? We would love to hear about it in the comments!
Tagged: Opinion & Polls • webmaster tools
