Posts Tagged ‘site search’

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Every now and then I look at a site and wonder if the owner is even trying to make money. Well, I guess I know they are because they do all the “right” things to make money, but they are doing all the wrong things to serve their customer’s needs.

Building a great website is a lot of work, but the job is never really done. There is always something you can do to improve performance, create a better customer experience, or generate a genuine desire for customers to return. And there are also things that shoo customers away, elicit a poor customer experience, and interfere with site performance. Here are just a few:

Too Many Ads

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Back in August of this year, while at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, I sat in a session where one of the speakers talked about site search. He said something that I fundamentally disagree with but it got me thinking about why you should or should not implement a search feature on your own site.

I believe that implementing site search is smart for large sites, but only if you can be sure it works nearly perfectly. On the other hand, the speaker in this session (and I completely forget who it is) said that, for analytical purposes, every site should implement site search, even if it doesn’t do a good job. This is what I fundamentally disagree with.

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What this is about: This list covers in-site search, what features should be included, what is expected by visitors and how the results should be laid out.

Why this is important: Site search is an important element of on-site usability. Both in its ability to help visitors find the information they are looking for, or by being absent if it doesn’t produce accurate results. Site search must be able to improve the visitor’s experience in your site, otherwise it does more harm than good.

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