A good many of you who web designers out there may in fact be correct in your assumptions regarding what your defined audience wants, but there’s likely an equally large percentage of you who have made design, layout, and content choices with your site that have missed the mark. You might have hunches, and more than a few folks will have opinions for you. But how do you really take the pulse of how intelligently your site is laid out for and experienced by visitors.
Here at 4GoodHosting, our expertise is naturally with quality web hosting in Canada, but our enthusiasm for trends in Internet marketing leads us to discover a number of topics that would likely interest our customers. This week, we’re inclined to discuss these 6 good PHP scripts for Canadian websites that are very practical for letting your site visitors leave you with quantifiable feedback on specific elements or components of your site, via ratings.
Here are 6 that we’ve come to be familiar with, and in order of the ones we think most highly of.
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Thumbs Up
The ThumbsUp rating script gets high marks for its modern, stylish design and how it makes it easy to implement an engaging ratings system for any of your websites. The ThumbsUp script works with a MySQL database, and incorporates an easy-to-understand configuration file, plus includes six custom templates. It looks sharp, and performs well too. The admin area offers plenty of control and customization options along with several selectable features. Users report finding it very easy to customize scripts to suit website styles and needs.
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Rating System
The Rating System script provides a very plain way for allowing visitors to engage with your content by leaving a rating score. Choose one of the 3 different user interface styles, and the proceed to documentation which explains how to implement and configure the script to suit the specifics of your website. Another big plus is that it allows visitors to leave feedback on your content, products, and media releases, and more.
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Skinnable Rating System
The Skinnable Rating System is not only a modern, comprehensive rating script that’s easily implemented, but it also boasts an advanced administration panel that provides an impressive level of control over your ratings system, statistics and the appearance of the system itself within the website. In addition, there’s also a handful of snappy features that also come included and add to the scripts’ overall high-quality finish.
It’s a strong fit for all modern browsers and mobile devices, and last but not least it can be integrated with any of your online content fairly simply for even the least experience webmaster.
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Poll
We like Poll for the fact it’s a useful little script than can be used to set up opinion polls on your website without much know-how or effort on behalf of the webmaster. Like Skinnable Rating System, it comes with a nice advanced admin panel where you’re able to manage your opinion polls via an intuitive user-interface that even a newbie could work their way around quite easily. Poll also comes fully documented, and is bundled with 3 poll styles to choose from, so it would bet #1 on the list if convenience and ease of use were the only criteria.
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Advanced Rating System
Advanced Rating System is the way to go for those of you who want comprehensive data from your ratings. It is a modern rating system that you can easily implement onto your website, and it lets visitors leave feedback and engage with your content on-the-fly – which of course means they’re more likely to do so! You’ve got your choice of a variety of bundled rating icons and colours that match the style of your website perfectly, and by making use of modern technologies including AJAX, IP protection, cross-domain embedding, and MySQL database it’s a champ for storing ratings data. The consensus it that it is a hugely customizable and attractive rating system that’s ideal for nearly any type of website.
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Minty AJAX Ratings
Those in the business seem to agree that ‘Minty’ AJAX Ratings script delivers a ‘cool’ solution for anyone wanting to set up a basic rating system for their website. It scores well for its smooth implementation steps, optional MySQL database use, easy customizable nature using simple CSS code, and AJAX instant-refresh. The Minty AJAX Ratings script is a great way to engage with your visitors with content that is more likely to promote that interaction. You can also retrieve feedback to see how your content, products or media releases are performing.
As mentioned above, the appeal of having visitors rate your site and / or individual parts of it is in the fact that it’s quantifiable input on how inviting the pages or site as a whole are for different types of users visiting it. There’s definitely a lot to be said for implementing one of these PHP scripts.
