ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming: Problem – Design – Solution

Chapter 7. Opinion Polls

Opinion polls consist of questions with a set of options from which users can select their response. Once users vote in a poll it's customary to show them current statistics about how the poll is going at that particular time. This chapter explains why polls are useful and important for different websites, and shows you how to design and implement a simple and maintainable voting module for your TheBeerHouse site.

Problem

Polls are used on a website for basically two reasons: because the site managers may be interested in what their users like (perhaps so they can modify their advertising or product offerings, or maybe in a more general sense to understand their users better) and to help users feel like they have some input to a site and make them feel like they are part of a community of users. Good polls always contain targeted questions that can help the site's managers know who their users are and what they want to find on the site. This information can be used to identify which parts of the site to improve or modify. Armed with this information, e-commerce businesses can highlight those products, provide more detailed descriptions or case studies, or offer discounts to convince users to buy from their site. Another use for the information is to attract advertising revenue. If you look on a typical medium- to large-sized site, you will frequently see an "Advertise with Us" link or something similar. If you were to inquire about the possibility of advertising ...