site searches
| Usability – the capacity of a web site to be easily navigated –has in recent times quite rightly been a major concern of web site owners with Return on Investment in mind.
Distilling this concept down, usability is the pursuit of making information accessible to our web site visitors in an intuitive and efficient manner. After all, finding information of one sort or another is the ultimate goal of every visitor to your site – whether it is product information, or simply your telephone number. Ultimately, then, the principal objective of web site owners is to make that task easy to accomplish. Leaving aside the wider issues of usability for now, let’s concentrate on the humble and often unsung site search. While emphasis is placed on clear and user-friendly navigation by means of buttons and menus, our efforts in these areas should be firmly underpinned by a decent site search facility. For the more routes users have to the information they are seeking on your site, the better. As always, assume your visitors are impatient people who are easily frustrated and will bail out of your domain within 15 seconds if they cannot find what they are looking for. So, where do we get a site search ASAP? Here are a number of options to consider. All are free or offer a subscription service that removes adverts from results pages and/or gives you greater functionality and customisation. |