Casting Votes / Making a Poll

[Boy]

A downside to the 'mailto' approach is that the visitor to your website needs a local email client installed and configured on their computer. Many people, such as myself, use web-based email clients so such links would not work for them.

[steve.ledger]

Well, you can set this, Boy.
My default email is Gmail. mailto: links open up a page and log me into gmail.
► https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10966?hl=en

You can also do similar with Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

[jamesd]

You could also do this with a simple form... Option A, Option B and Submit

[Boy]

Well, you can set this, Boy.
My default email is Gmail. mailto: links open up a page and log me into gmail.
► https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10966?hl=en

You can also do similar with Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

Thanks for clarifying that, Steve, but I use another webmail service that does not allow this. Of course I could set things up differently through one of the web services you mentioned but I do not really see the immediate need for this.

My point was that probably many other people do not have the 'mailto' feature configured properly either so that the polling solution Acorn proposed will not work in those cases.

[PeteS]

How about a form widget and have a bullet option: A or B and the user clicks send - that doesn't require a local email client, and you can use your own email address (but you may want to add a captcha verification).
I'm sure JotForm/Form2Go could easily do this.

[egrove12]

I've just thought of a new approach: When a site visitor clicks a or b, they will be brought to a corresponding "thanks for voting" page (IMPORTANT: there will be a different "thanks for voting" page for each of the two choices). I will then use google analytics to tally page views of the "thank you" pages. Whichever "thank you" page has the most visits, that's the selection that got the most votes.

thoughts?

[Acorn]

So I visit the Option A page 500 times, and...?
Provided you can filter down to unique IP addresses, then yes a good approach.

Acorn

[Boy]

Perhaps this will do the job: http://pollcode.com/ (Look at the FAQ at the bottom of the page to learn how the service works).