Find out how to create an online survey using PHP…

Online surveys are very handy for gathering information about your customers.

• Were they satisfied with your service?
• How could you improve their shopping experience?
• How satisfied were they with the speed of your technical support?

Questions like these can help you to learn more about your target customer and improve your website to meet their needs.  Survey’s can also encourage repeat custom (especially if you offer a free gift or voucher for taking part).

PHPBuilder.com have posted a tutorial showing you how to create an online survey using PHP for your website.  The tutorial shows you how to create a simple 12 question format where the recipient answers: Very-Dissatisfied | Dissatisfied | Satisfied | Very Satisfied | Neutral.

The tutorial shows you how to handle the replies in two ways - you can either email the results out to an address or store the received information in a database.  The first part addresses the former, and the second part (yet to be posted) will address how to store the receive information in a database for later review.

A helpful article if wanted to give this a go yourself!  We’ll let you know when the second part comes out.

Adding RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to your PHP shopping cart has many benefits, including its ability to improve your websites online presence, exposure and organic search engine rankings.

What is RSS?

RSS enables the public, and people interested in your industry, product or service, to keep up to date with your website and any new content (such as articles, news, product updates/ announcements) in an automated manner.

Once RSS is set up on your site you can syndicate your content.  Content syndication enables webmasters or anybody with an interest (possibly potential customers) to subscribe to the RSS feed and receive the content in real time on their PC.  All the recipient needs is a “feed reader” or “aggregator” installed on their PC which can be readily downloaded free of charge.

The Benefits of RSS

Distribute content directly to consumers - Visitors to your website and people generally interested in your industry are likely to find and subscribe to your feed, enabling you to reach your consumers via another medium.

No subscription procedure - RSS is becoming more and more popular, partly because it enables users to receive information without the hassle of subscribing and revealing personal information.

Dynamic - If you change your content, your subscriber will know about it straight away.

Attract new visitors - RSS enables users to review content without having to visit a site.  When a user wants to read a full article they are encouraged to visit the source (your website).  It’s rather like email marketing, but with RSS you can…

Bypass spam filters - RSS is delivered directly to your subscriber’s desktop.

Increase search engine visibility - Search engines love websites that provide fresh content on a regular basis.  By adding content frequently you will encourage the search engines to visit your website more and index your keyword-rich content on a regular basis.   It also helps the search engines to recognise your site as being closely themed, and as a result better match your website to related search queries.

Get more back links - Fresh content in the form of news, helpful articles, tutorials etc. attracts back links from related websites - quality, related backlinks = increased search engine visibility.

Any more benefits? - I’m sure they’ll be lots more benefits for both webmasters and users, but it was these few that sprung to mind.   If you can think of any more add them to the bottom!

Getting Started with RSS

Viart PHP shopping cart has RSS integrated, enabling you to simply activate RSS on your website.