February 8th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi .
If you run you own WordPress blog, you know the effort that it takes to engage users and keep them coming back for more. You can have the best blog in the world, but if people are not being engaged, you can’t sustain your traffic, and your community will not be as strong as it should be.
One way to engage users is by creating magnetic polls. By that I mean polls that are more than about “what you had for lunch today.” Something about your industry, issues and challenges in it, and possible controversies. WordPress makes it easy to create polls on your blog. You can use WP Polls to create polls and track them on your site. You can customize the design as you wish, and you can set deadlines or schedule your polls months in advance. But is hosting your polls the best way to go?
After testing both internal and external polls, I have come to conclusion that external polls give you more strategic options to drive traffic to your site and engage your users. Sites such as Poll Daddy and LinkedIn allow you to create your own polls and share them with other easily. And they are compatible with WordPress too!
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January 12th in WP Stuff by Wordpress Jedi .
WordPress 2.7 is finally here, and folks can’t get enough of it. I have talked about how the interface has improved. I can honestly say that as a result of using WP 2.7, I have become more productive. But I am a greedy guy and can’t stop asking for more features. I wish I could drag and drop the menus and their items to the front page and have them opened there. I also wish there was a way to add menu items on the interface and have the ability to program the code there. I am sure someday we will see some of these features, but right now these two features are on the top of my list.
What would you change about WP 2.7? What would you add? I am interested to see if you have had any major issue with the latest version of WordPress. Please share your thoughts. What would you like to see in WordPress 2.8?
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December 28th in WP Solutions by Wordpress Jedi .
I don’t know what it is about creating attractive polls that gets to me. I love WP Poll, and it’s a great plug-in to host your own polls on your blog, but there is no question that there are limitations. If you really want to create a kick ass poll, you should try PollDaddy.
PollDaddy is a web 2.0 poll online application that allows you to create polls on the fly. It not only allows you to create attractive polls, but it also comes with features that you wouldn’t get from a mere plug-in:
- Foreign language support: now English language won’t a barrier for your polls.
- CSS Enhancements: you can practically do anything your heart desires with the polls on PollDaddy. You can change the CSS or even add HTML code to your polls.
- Image/Video capability: showing your visitors videos and asking them for their opinion is a powerful concept. You can’t do that easily with WP Poll but it goes like a sneeze with PollDaddy.
- Conditional Branching: this is the most powerful feature. You have probably seen flowcharts in the past. You can create branches for your poll based on the answers that you get.
- Analytics: I am a number cruncher, and anything that allows me to dig deep into numbers is attractive to me. This feature is for paid members only, but it’s very powerful as it allows you to look at individual prospects and see how they interacted with your polls.
There you have it. PollDaddy, which is in beta, is no joke. It’s more powerful than anything you get on WordPress or even Facebook. And best of all, it’s for free. Can’t beat that.
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