Chapter 13: Keeping Sites Fresh and
Chapter 13: Keeping Sites Fresh and Engaging 343 The style and frequency of your polls are important considerations. Here are some tips to help you write great polls: Be sure your question is written in a clear way. Avoid double negatives in your poll answer; this can confuse readers. Avoid using incomplete sentences. Avoid jargon and local sayings if you have a widespread, international, multilingual audience. Answer choices should be approximately the same length. Have at least 3 answers and at most 7. A happy medium is 5. note For an excellent tutorial on polls, see Creating Online Polls by Joseph Gannon, at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/usability/ library/us-polls/. Secret #224: Add Discussion Groups Another great way to provide helpful services for your site visitors as well as keep your site actively generating new content is to have discussion groups, also referred to as forums. As with commenting, forums can attract the folks you don t want as much as the ones you do. So before even considering forums for your site, assess whether you have the human resources available to manage and moderate. Table 13-3 describes some situations where forums can be very useful. Adding a forum to your site can be technically quite easy, as many solutions for forums exist, spanning the range of technologies and pricing. Open source solutions, such as those built with PHP or Perl, are often free or very low cost. Numerous ASP.NET scripts and services are available for free or low cost, too (see Figure 13-11). Some service providers also offer forum software already installed and ready to go, there are pre-packaged software products for forums, and you can custom-build forums for your specific needs using a range of application languages including PHP, Perl, .NET, and Java. note An excellent, independent listing of forum software and services is available at http://www.thinkofit.com/webconf/forumsoft.htm. The site also contains related tutorials, articles, and product reviews. Secret #225: Use Web-based Chat As with discussion forums, chat can be used to extend a hand to your community and create a longer lasting relationship with them as a result. The scenarios where you might wish to use chat are very similar to those where you dhave a discussion
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