A Comparison of WP-Polls and PollDaddy.com

July 21st, 2007 ·

So my client want me to do the following :

I want to run a poll on my web site, as often as I want. I want run the poll in the sidebar of the front page only. I want to have a polls archive page where all the polls can be archived.

Simple enough. But I had no idea of how polls works or what polling software are available. So I had to go through a learning curve. And I am writing this article for you so that you don’t have to go through the same.

First off, there are two major methods of running polls on a site. You can use either a plug-in for WordPress like WP-Polls, Democracy or you could use something external to WordPress e.g. PollDaddy.

But first how many alternatives do you have in the first place ?

Web Based Polls

Here are the links of a few sites that offer you polling software, widgets etc.

Plug-Ins Based Polls

In my quest to find the solution, I went on to explore both of these options. I checked the plug-in WP-Polls and the external option of PollDaddy.com. This article will provide you a Comparison of these two alternatives and will give you some factors to decide which one to use in your specific situation. The reason I checked for these two is because these are the one’s which are most popular in its category.

PollDaddy

Poll Daddy is one great service I must say. They offer AJAX based polls in the form of JavaScript tag. However there could be some reasons you may not want to include javascript tags [in case you suspect that your users have generally javascript turned off, you may actually use flash based Polls which offer the exactly the same interface as the javascript on offers.

The types of polls available at the PollDaddy includes multiple choice polls with the option that you may control whether or not users may select more then one option as their answer. You also can control whether user may have some other response that is not included in the choice list that you have provided. Like all other polling software, they also let you control whether the same user can vote more then once or not. They let you decide how would you define the ’same user’ based on combination of factors like cookie or IP address or both.

The other advantage of having PollDaddy is that you have a number of pre-designed themes available. You can choose the one that looks best with your blog’s theme. Moreover, people like you and me are constantly adding their theme’s for public usage.

The list of features PollDaddy offers does not end here. You have an option of getting a URL link to the poll you are conducting. This could be really handy if you are running a newsletter. Your users in that case may click on an image or link to go to the PollDaddy’s page and vote there.

One more advantage of using PollDaddy [ or other web based polling services] is that it runs independent of your website. So your website will not have to do any maintenance for these polls you are conducting.

Here is a sample poll that I created on PollDaddy.com

WP-Polls

I can go on listing the merits of PollDaddy.com, but on the plug-in side, WP-Polls is a serious contender. In a number of cases WP-Polls will actually win, based on the special circumstances you might have.

First, WP-Polls is totally integrated with your website. Though you could use PollDaddy with a widget in your theme, the fact that WP-Polls is built as a plugin, makes the the integration of a poll extremely easy. So instead of pasting JavaScript inside your post, you may use tags like

[.Poll=2] without the dot.

in your post and you are set.

Secondly, with PollDaddy, you have the option of customizing your poll using the css. You would not have an option to touch the html. In most cases you don’t have to touch the html anyway. However in certain cases you might want to have your custom html. WP-Polls is great in this as it offers you the full HTML template. Since its on your site, you have the css too, so you can play with the design in any conceivable way as you wish.

There are more reasons actually not to go with an external poll solution like PollDaddy. One of these reason is that you actually own your poll on you site. While with a 3rd party solution, the web site will determine whether the poll you are conducting is ok with their term and conditions or not. They may shut your poll down whenever they wish. Though it does not happen every other day, but this is considered as a serious risk by a few bloggers and they recommend to own every other feature that your browser relies on.

There are other added advantage of owning your polls, you can change the way your polls behave by custom php coding as the whole php code of any plug-in is available at your disposal. You can go on further and utilize the data you generated by in hose plug-ins since everything is saved on your server. You have exclusive access to the polls answers , IP address of the users and the exact time of the vote, though not all of those is required by a general blogger. But some of us don’t want to limit their abilities to do anything in the future, keeping every possible option open.

Following is a poll from WP-Polls default options.