More experiments: Shopify and PollDaddy mashed up with Javascript to provided timed surveys

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

March 24, 2008 [13397 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:

1. Cookies to remember how many pages a visitor has already seen
2. A nicely styled (CSS) alert that would appear when a fixed number of pages had been shown
3. Javascript code from PollDaddy to create the poll overlay when the alert is selected
4. Somewhere to host my new Javascript and my CSS
5. 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.

 

  

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