Adding a Poll to Your WordPress Blog

I love WordPress as much as I was frustrated by maintaining a static website.

I’m a tinkerer .. I don’t understand how anyone can plan every detail of a website in advance .. code the whole thing and then have major drama when you need to change anything. Up until an hour ago, I didn’t even know I wanted a poll on my blog. If this had to be planned months ago it wouldn’t have happened.

In my past life, I worked on major projects. Months of user input and planning, endless design meetings, an infrastructure had to be built, coding started, project meetings, we’re already over budget and behind schedule and we’ve barely started coding, QA kicks in, user testing starts, wait .. we forgot a feature, is this really what we agreed to?, people come and go .. months pass and if the stars align the end result more or less delivers the original requirements. If not, put it in the budget for next year and create a new project to add “new features”. That’s the same process as building a static website.

A WordPress blog design can be quickly adapted to your immediate needs. With a little bit of knowledge, you can add a feature in minutes. You do need an overall plan, otherwise you blog design could start to look cluttered. Take a look at other blogs. What do you like about the design? Hire a graphic designer from ifreelance to help with the overall design.

I was reading Jim’s Marketing Blog this morning and was admiring his design when I noticed his poll. A poll … why didn’t I think of that? I suggest polls to my clients all the time. Maybe I should take my own advice.

If it was during the week, when I concentrate on client tasks, I would have put it on my todo list for the weekend. Yaro Starak (get his free ebook from a link on the right) tells his students they have to post content and market their blog before making design changes. Taking his advice, I get to tinker with my design (which I love to do) because I’m writing a blog post about the process.

Adding a poll to a WordPress blog is easy. I went to the free WordPress plugin site, searched for poll, then read the descriptions of the most popular plugins. WP-Polls plugin does exactly what I want, so I read the details on his site, checked out the demo and downloaded it. Unzipped and ftp’d it to my hosting site and voila! it’s there. I created a poll, added the widget to my sidebar and I’m done. It took me longer to write this blog post than it did to install the plugin.

Do you have a poll on your blog? And don’t forget to take my poll.