More experiments: Shopify and PollDaddy mashed up with Javascript to provided timed surveys
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
March 24, 2008 [14891 views]
A cold wet Easter weekend provided the right sort of setting for some programming experiments.
As already mentioned here I am experimenting with an ecommerce toolkit called Shopify to create and build a ecommerce store for a French Food seller, http://www.marketquarter.com at Borough Market.
I am also reading Web Analytics:an hour a day by Avinash Kaushik and he makes a strong argument for looking at ways of collecting qualitative data from customers as well as the usual quantitative data using tools such as Google Analytics.
So, I wanted a survey tool that I could integrate into my Shopify site. I also decided that I only wanted to ask my visitors for their comments once they had been in the site for some time; say, viewed 5 pages.
I posted a question on LinkedIn to see whether anyone had a quick solution and was recommended http://www.polldaddy.com as a possible survey tool. It looks great and is free for small surveys but it does not have any timed survey functionality. I was going to need to write this myself.
I realised that my solution was going to need the following components:
- Cookies to remember how many pages a visitor has already seen
- A nicely styled (CSS) alert that would appear when a fixed number of pages had been shown
- Javascript code from PollDaddy to create the poll overlay when the alert is selected
- Somewhere to host my new Javascript and my CSS
- Code to integrate into my Shopify template
One icy weekend later and it works. For those of you who are interested take a look at the code http://www.otherlabs.com/survey/alertSurvey.js and the CSS http://www.otherlabs.com/survey/survey.css.
I am not a Javascript programmer or CSS designer and all of this has been pieced together (with a little help) from bits and pieces around the web. It does show, however, just how far you can get with such bits and pieces.
What do you think?
