Want to find out what your audience thinks without adding another subscription service to your budget? There are dozens of survey apps available today, and many of them are simple to use and offer impressive features, templates, and more. However, it can be frustrating to have even more of your business’ data in another app instead of being an integral part of your main site.
If you’d like to run surveys directly from your own server or hosting account, Survd is a great new choice we’re going to look at today. It’s a self-hosted survey management system that makes it easy to create and run surveys and polls, then get the feedback in the format you want. You can install it in a few steps, and you won’t even need to setup a database for it. Let’s take a look at how Survd can make it easier and cheaper for your business to learn more about its audience.
Setting Up Survd
When you purchase a copy of Survd, you’ll receive a zip download of the files needed for installation, as well as a registration code to activate the software. To set it up on your site, just unzip the files and upload them to your server. It’ll usually work best to upload the files to a sub-folder, so then you can use Survd from, for example, yoursite.com/survd.
Each license is tied to the domain you register it on, so you’ll only be able to run surveys on the main domain or subdomain you installed Survd into.
Once everything’s uploaded, browse to the domain you uploaded your Survd files to. If everything uploaded correct, you should see the installation screen as below. Enter your name, username, email, and password as normal, then also enter the registration code you received after purchasing Survd.
Install Survd by just entering your info and registration key
Seconds later, you’ll see the Survd login screen, which is what you’ll now see by default when you visit the site or subfolder you installed Survd into. You’re now ready to start creating surveys to add to your site.
Welcome to the Survd dashboard!
Using Survd
Creating Your First Survey
Creating a new survey is fairly easy. Enter a name and description for the survey on the right sidebar and choose if you want to save submissions in a CSV or XML file, as well as whether or not Survd should email you whenever you get a new response to your survey. You’ll also need to enter a shortcode for the survey. By default, Survd will use a lowercase version of your survey name without spaces as the shortcode, but you can use any alphanumerical code to indentfy the survey if you wish.
Now, you can start adding fields to your survey. Enter a label for the question, then choose what type of response is required. Your surveys can include text fields, radio buttons, check boxes, true/false options, and more. You’ll also need to enter a unique shortcode for the question, but again Survd will fill this by default so you don’t have to change it if you don’t want to.
Create a survey, form, poll, or more
If your question requires multiple answer options, including a radio or checkbox question, then you’ll need to add response options. Click Add Validation under your question, then enter the option’s name and a value that choice represents on in the form. You can add as many options as you wish. Click Save Values when you’re finished.
Enter as many options as you wish for your questions.
Now, if you’re finished editing your question, click the checkmark on the right to accept the changes. You can add as many questions as you need, go back and edit questions, or drag and drop them to get them in the order you want.
Accept changes before going on to create the next question
When you’re finished creating the survey, you can click Preview on the bottom of the question list to see a preview of what your survey will look like. You can even enter sample data in your form which will be verified and saved in Survd just like it will when people are actually taking your survey. If everything’s working like you want, close the preview and save your survey.
See how your survey looks before publishing it
Installing a Survey on Your Site
Once you’ve created a survey or poll, you can install it into your main site for others to fill out. Click the Install tab in Survd, select whether your site uses jQuery and an event listener, and you’ll get code to add to your site’s header and body to embed the poll.
Install surveys on your site by copying embed code from Survd
Survd sends a basic HTML survey or form to your page, which will simply use the existing stylesheets on your website. Whether you’re putting it into a static HTML site or a CMS powered site, your polls will blend right in with your existing style and branding. Plus, anytime you make changes to your survey in Survd, they’ll automatically show up on your site without changing any code. Visitors can now take your poll or survey easily without visiting another site. Once they’re finished and hit submit, their responses will be saved without needing to refresh the page.
Rather than making new themes for your surveys, just add them to your own existing theme in a couple steps.
Get Your Survey Data
You may automatically receive an email whenever a completed survey is submitted if you selected that option when creating a poll. Either which way, you’ll always be able to view all of your survey data from the Survd web interface. You can sort and search your data; just click the top of a column to sort it. You can copy data directly from the fields, or download a CSV or XML file of the results. One of the best advantages of running apps on your own server is that you have complete control over the data, and Survd makes it easy to use it however you want.
View all of your responses quickly from the web interface, or download in CSV format.
By default, online reports will be displayed in table mode, but if your survey included multiple choice options, you can see a pie chart of the results as well. Select Pie as the report type, then select the question to display. This is a quick way to get an idea of your audience’s responses without reading through mind-numbing charts.
Get a quick idea of your audiance's preferences and more with visual charts
Support
Installing a new webapp isn’t always a breeze. Sometimes you may hit a snag or have a problem that is difficult to figure out even with all of your web technology expertise. This is one of the selling points of software-as-a-service webapps: they keep everything running smooth and you don’t have to worry about it. Thankfully, Survd is both easy to use and well supported, so this shouldn’t be too much of a worry with it. I hit a few snags while testing out our review copy, and the developer was quick to help. Survd’s Twitter feed is full of helpful support responses, so you can feel sure that you’ll get quick support if you have a problem getting it up and running on your site.
Additionally, Survd contains a fairly detailed help file, which you can access from any screen in Survd. This should help you understand how Survd works and help you get started creating complex surveys, forms, and more without much difficulty.
Get help whenever you need it
Conclusion
One of the best ways you can reach your market and serve your customers better is to know more about them. If you’ve hesitated to run surveys on your site because you felt the subscription costs were too steep to justify, Survd might be just right for you. It makes it easy to build anything from a poll for your site’s sidebar, a contact form for potential clients, or a full-blown survey to find out more about your audience. You’ll never need to worry about your survey service shutting down or losing your data again. Plus, for a limited time, you can snag a copy for only $9.95, which is 80% off the normal price.
What do you use to power surveys and polls on your site? Let us know your favorite survey tool in the comments and if you’ve tried out Survd, let us know how it went for you!