Create online polls, surveys, ratings and questionnaires with Polldaddy

Polldaddy offers a selection of commercial (paid-for) services but everything we need to do can be achieved using the free option. However, you will need to register first. To do this, you will first need to go to the Polldaddy website. When the website appears, scroll down to the foot of the page and click the See Plans & Pricing button. Then click the blue Sign Up button in the Free column. Now fill in the personal details form, choose a password and click the Create My Account button. An email will be sent to the supplied address – click the link it contains to activate your account.

You will now be logged into the Polldaddy website, at the Dashboard screen. Click to open the ‘Create a new’ dropdown menu. Polldaddy offers four different types of online questionnaire – Survey, Poll, Quiz and Rating. Survey is for creating lengthier questionnaires that allow for detailed answers, while Poll, Quiz and Rating are much simpler, presenting click-to-choose options. We are going to create a poll to find out if people have yet become Computeractive Subscriber Club members – so choose Poll.

Polldaddy now displays the question form. This varies depending on the style of questionnaire chosen in Step 2 but, for Poll, it offers a field for the question and then five further fields for the answers. To populate these, click and type. If five fields aren’t sufficient for the available answers, click the Add New Answer button at the bottom. Both the question and answer fields can be supported by images or audio. If your questionnaire would benefit from such adornments, click the Media button alongside the relevant fields and use the Choose File and Upload buttons to upload the content to Polldaddy. If you make a mistake when writing an answer, click the adjacent Delete button and start again.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page, below the answer fields, and you’ll find a bunch of style options and other poll parameters. Use the slider to pan through the available styles and click the relevant radio button to select one that appeals. Still further down the page are numerous tools to tweak both the way the poll works and the way that it can be used. It’s possible, for instance, to set an expiry date and time for a poll, after which no more responses will be allowed. You can also choose if and how results are displayed to respondents, whether and how often repeat votes are allowed, if users can leave comments and whether a sharing link should be displayed. Make your selections then click the Create Poll button.

It’s now time to decide how the poll should be published. Polldaddy displays an Embed/Link dialogue box with a variety of options down the left-hand side. If you want to share the poll on Facebook, for example, click that link for the relevant embedding code. We have clicked Wordpress, to get the code that can be pasted into a Wordpress blog. Now click and drag to highlight the embedding code, then right-click it and choose Copy (or use the Control and C keyboard shortcut) to copy it to the Windows Clipboard.

Finally, switch to the website or service on which you intend to publish the poll – a Wordpress blog in our case. Now use the Control and V keyboard shortcut to paste the code copied in Step 5 into the relevant place (the HTML tab of the Edit Post screen, in the case of Wordpress). Save as appropriate and then your poll should be live and ready to use – and it should look something like ours. To try it out, choose one of the options and click the Vote button.