To begin the program, we'll go to the web address of the Max Surveys system on your website. This will almost always be in the form of:

You will also find this statement:

"Important Note: It is essential that you do NOT use the BACK button on your browser in the following pages. If you do, you will probably see a message that says "Warning: Page has Expired." This will not happen as long as you use the buttons provided. Thus, there's really no need to use the BACK button. "

Hopefully, that is self-explanatory. All the buttons you need are included on the webpages. Please do NOT use the BACK (or FORWARD) buttons on your browser. This caveat is necessary because the system can lose data unless you use the navigation buttons provided on the Max Surveys pages.

(Technical note: Actually, it won’t lose data, but it can appear that way because of warning messages that may appear if you use the BACK button on your browser.)

After entering your userid and password, you come to the "Control Panel" of the Max Surveys system. This is the main operating page. The first time you come here, you’ll want to use the Add a New Survey button. So let’s not look at the other elements of this page just yet. Just hit the Add a New Survey button.

Entering Surveys

When you do, you’ll see a page that asks for:

• Survey Question
• Description

Let’s go over these.

Survey Question is what you're asking visitors to vote on. For example, "Do you like the MaxSurveys system?"  After you enter the question, you'll then enter the answers that can be chosen to vote for.

Note the Description field.  This is optional. If you want a paragraph to appear (indented) under the survey question, which speaks a bit about the question, you may add that here.

Then you press Add Question. You'll see a verification message of what you've entered. And are then prompted to Add Answers. On the Add Answers screen, you start with two blank fields.  The first is one of the answers to the survey question you just entered. The next is the "sort order" which is how the naswers will appear, when presented to the visitor.  For example, on the above question, "Do you like the MaxSurveys system?"  your answers may be:

Question                 Sort Order
yes                       1
no                         2
cane the author!      3

If you didn't have a sort order, the survey would be presented in alphabetical order as:

Do you like the MaxSurveys system?

cane the author!
no
yes

Then you press the Update Answers button and you get a verification message for how many answers you have to the question.  And then you go to the Control Panel.

List of Surveys You've Added

At this point, you go back to the Control Panel. And what do you see? You see your question in the list of the survey questions. Only one is there, if this is the first survey you’ve entered, but the list will expand as you add more surveys.

Let’s look at this list:

It shows you the Question. When you click on the word View on the same line as the Question, it shows you what the survey voting report secdtion will look like, after the visitor votes.  At first, it will show No Voting Yet. But after visitors have voted, it will show you the same report page as the visitors will see. This display will use the font, font color, and templates that were setup in the Configuration section.

Now suppose you have lots of survey questions. Say you have 50 surveys. Or even more. You probably don’t want the whole list on one page. So the list is "page-inated." This means you only see a certain number at one time, say 20. You can hit the Next and Back words, in order to see more of the list. This number is configurable. You can set it to be whatever you like.

Note the word Modify. When you click there, it takes you to the same page you used to enter the question and answers, except that here you can modify what you originally typed.

What about the other buttons on this page? You can find out more here: