Polls Boutique, which is a play on words from the 1989 Beastie Boys album, is a free polling service that’s great for creating simple polls with statistical depth and a great sense of community. Like Polldaddy, which we use extensively on Webware and used for Webware 100 voting this year, and more recently on News.com for the iPod survey, Polls Boutique lets you build and deploy a poll to your blog or social networking profile quickly and easily.
What makes it notable is that you can add all sorts of media to your polls like photos, audio and video clips. It’s also got some really great statistical analysis that lets you see the make-up of your voters, both in gender and age. There are also options to drill down by specific age group, geographical location, and even astrological sign (we’re not counting votes from Sagittarius voters in the poll below–sorry). These numbers come alongside easy to read, and simplistic charts that can be parsed quickly.
Today the service has launched a customizable widget that lets you change the colors, fonts, and background image. The design process itself is a cinch, although you can’t change things like the height, width, or the font on the answers–things that really let you match a widget to the look and feel of your site. You can however set the background to be transparent, so it will blend in to your post like it does on the example widget I’ve embedded below. Be sure to check out the view full statistics option to dig deep through user votes.
Original post by Josh Lowensohn and software by Elliott Back
