Feedback comes in different forms. You might simply put an e-mail contact address on your web site that visitors can use to send you feedback. You might add a feedback form where visitors can provide comments and/or use checkboxes and drop-downs to provide information on how much they liked your site (or disliked your site), what features they enjoyed, etc.

The principal drawback to those types of feedback is that your visitors need to work to send you information - find the feedback page, fill in the blanks, etc. - and lots of your visitors just can't be bothered to do that. The answer is to have some kind of instant feedback mechanism in front of your visitors at just the moment when they might be tempted to provide that feedback, and to make providing that feedback as simple as possible.

The answer is "rate_this_whatever_it_is" - a small and simple form at the end of the page that provides visual and text information on how previous visitors rated the 'thing', a simple drop down with the usual 'excellent' .... 'poor' options selectable, and a 'vote now' button to submit the form data. No doubt you have seen something similar on many, many web sites before - but it always seems to be a feature of a much larger set of scripts, for example in a photo gallery where you can 'rate this image', etc. If you have a large complex integrated system like that, 'rate this' invariably comes built-in.

But sometimes you don't need or want the complex integrated script, all you want is a simple little piece of php code you can add to some pages of your site. And that's what this article/tutorial is about: providing a simple, self-contained, script that you use by adding a couple of lines of php code to each page where you want this kind of feedback. Other than that, all you need is a small MySQL database table, and a couple of images.

Great!! How?

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