Introduction

To help analyse the recent Twitter problems with Eastlink, we ran a survey using Survey Monkey.    The resulting visits to the survey showed that there was a lot of interest from twitter followers in taking part in online surveys.

The next logical step was to look at integrating a survey into the Scotia Systems site.

As the Scotia Systems blog is running on WordPress, a quick Google search showed up SurveyGizmo as a likely candidate

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The first hurdle however was downloading the WordPress plug-in as the file available from the website appeared corrupt.   We contacted SurveyGizmo via Twitter and this was quickly resolved with a new plug-in sent via email.    @SurveyGizmo are quite active on Twitter and are quick to respond.   Way to go for support FTW!   

It’s a miserable rainy Sunday afternoon outside so I thought I’d have a go at integrating SurveyGizmo into our site.

Impressions of SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo is an exceptional tool in terms of customization, integration and features.  As mentioned above, most of the features are available across all account levels, with only the number of responses per month restricted.   

For seamlessly integrating a survey within a website I can’t find any other product close to SurveyGizmo – especially at the price (free)!

The array of available questions, formatting and reporting should cover all your online survey requirements.

WordPress Installation Overview

Here’s a quick overview of the steps needed to integrate SurveyGizmo with your own website:

Step 1 – Create An Account

There are several levels of accounts with SurveyGizmo – ranging from Free, to Enterprise.

Surprisingly – the free account has a lot of the features of the higher end enterprise model, with only a restriction on the number of responses per month (250).

Here’s a breakdown of the features by account type.

Step 2 – Request API key

To connect to the SurveyGizmo API you’ll need to request an API key which is used when you install the plug-in in your WordPress installation.   This is easily done by going into your newly created account and clicking on the API tab.

Step 3 – Install Plug-in

Once you have the plug-in downloaded – install it as you would any other WordPress plug-in.   This will add a SurveyGizmo option to your Dashboard where you can now go and add the API key you obtained in step 2.

Step 4 – Create The Survey

Now you’re ready to create a survey, it really is a simple drag and drop process.     The online wizard takes you through adding different question types and possible answers.

It only takes a moment to generate a complete survey with many different question types available.

Step 5 – Customize The Look

I have to say that once I got to the point of trying to customise the survey – I was blown away by just how far you can modify the themes to match your website.    The online wizard provides all the CSS tuning you should need to make the survey fit right in with your website design.   

You can see at the end of this tutorial just how well the finished result matches the style of the Scotia Systems website.

Step 6 – Embed HTML and Publish

Once you’re survey is complete – you come to the publishing stage.    At this point, SuveyGizmo gives you five (six for paid accounts) ways of publishing your survey.

1) Web Link
2) Javascript Embed
3) Static HTML Embed
4) iFrame Embed
6) MailChimp Campaign
6) Email Campaign (Paid versions)

We’ve used the Javascript Embed on Scotia Systems and it works perfectly.    Simply embed the provided code into your HTML formatted blog post and you’re done!

Step 7 – Analyse The Results

The first statistics to greet you when you view your dashboard is a report on the surveys you have running and a geographical breakdown of responses.

From here you can then drill down into individual surveys and questions, with automatic formatting into pie-charts or bar-graphs.    You also have the capability export to CSV/Excel for further processing.

Summary

Quite simple this one!   If you want to integrate a fully featured online survey into your existing website – SurveyGizmo is the way to go.

Simple, fully featured, cost effective and easy to integrate.

After having had success with Survey Monkey during the recent Eastlink Twitter problems, we’re giving Survey Gizmo a try.

Using Survey Gizmo we should be able to embed surveys within the Scotia Systems site.

Here’s a test:

As a follow-up post on duplicate content on WordPress blogs – here’s an additional tip.

You can stop the search engines from indexing duplicate pages such as monthly/daily archives by using the following code snippet:

if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page() || is_category() || is_tag())
{
       echo ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />’;
}
else
{
        echo ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />’;
}

You can add or remove arguments in line 1 to include or exclude pages form being indexed.

The code should be inserted into the <head> section of header.php.

Here’s a quick tip for WordPress users.   Identical title tags on pages are frowned upon by search engines, so ideally you want each title tag (and meta description) to be unique. 

With WordPress you’ll find that your second page, third page etc all have the same title.   You can fix this with the following PHP code:

<?php if ($paged < 2){} else {echo (‘ Page ‘); echo ($paged);} ?>

By inserting the above into the title tag – if the page is the page 1, nothing will happen but for any other pages it will append “Page #".

You can use similar code in the Meta Description too to help make it unique.

If you’re running a blog, chances are it is probably running on a version of WordPress.   However, did you know that there’s a major new revision (3.0) due for release soon?

WordPress 3.0 is currently in Beta testing, and the full release is due on May 1st.  

But what can you expect in this new release?   Well here’s a quick run down of the new features.

Multi Site

This is quite a major change to the core functionality of WordPress, however it’s a feature which has been used for some time on the WordPress.com site for hosting multiple sites.

Version 3.0 merges this functionality so that anyone can host multiple WordPress blogs on their own machine.

New Theme

There’s a new default theme called twenty ten.    This new theme, along with menu and post changes (see later) show how WordPress is become more of an all-round CMS tool rather than just a blogging platform.    It’ll be interesting to see how these changes alter the CMS marketplace share of Joomla and Drupal.

WordPress also have a Twenty Ten Template Demo site up and running which you can play around with to see how the template works.

Improved Navigation Menus

The New version of WordPress will now include Woo Navigation menus as default.   You can see how these are used in the sample twenty ten demo site mentioned above.

And here’s a demo which shows just how easy it is to add predefined pages and categories using Woo Navigation.

Custom Post Types

Another change which positions WordPress as a CMS is the inclusion of custom post types such as move, album, quote.

Instead of going into the details in this post – here is a good article which discusses custom post types in wordpress 3.0.

Change to Default Username

A simple change, but one which will harden the security on future WordPress sites.   By default, on older installations of WordPress, the administrative account was always created as “admin”.   

Although it’s possible to change this, many installs keep the default which makes hacking the site easier.   

Now when installing WordPress you’re prompted to choose a name.

Summary

Well to me it looks like WordPress really wants to establish itself as a full blown CMS to compete with the likes of Joomla and Drupal.   

I like the WordPress interface and how it can be customised, so I’m looking forward to implementing some test sites using 3.0.

I think this will bring the world of CMS development to many more people which can only be a good thing.

Bring on May 1st!

Further Screenshots of WordPress 3.0 are available at www.wpbeginner.com

I’ve just switched on the doFollow plugin for WordPress which means that all comments on this blog will provide valid links which the search engines will follow.

Using Akisment for spam protection appears to have stopped 99% of comment spam now, so hopefully adding the doFollow to the blog will lead to further real commenting!

Time will tell….   I’ll report back later with the results…

Found a useful article today on how to implement meta tags in wordpress:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress

Good for improving the SEO of a blog site by providing unique page descriptions.

I’ve used this a few times now to integrate WordPress into an existing theme.

Easy to follow and well written:

http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/

In fact it was this tutorial that integrated WordPress into this Scotia Systems site!

Wow!  I’ve just updated the Scotia Systems blog with a tool called Odiogo, and I have to say I’m really impressed!

Odiogo is a free service which hooks into your blog to create an instant podcast.  Very slick!

And FREE!

If you have a blog – go to www.odiogo.com and sign up today!

Found this website recently – good source for tutorials on developing wordpress themes in CSS:

http://www.wpdesigner.com/