Having a search facility on your site is fundamental
The importance of having search on your site is one of the seven fundamentals for an effective web site which we covered in the last post
As pretty much everyone knows, the internet has always been synonymous with search. In the early days of the web, it was often said that Yahoo! was the internet because search, along with email, was the web’s killer app. These days, to ‘google’ something has become the common parlance, like doing the ‘hoovering’ as opposed to the vacuuming (we don’t all , as yet, do the ‘dysoning’) As the web has grown, so has Google, as our primary need online is to be able find the relevant information we want quickly and effectively. Google fulfills that need.
Search is so much of what people do online that in effect Google has just become the defacto navigation device. Where isn’t there a internet search box? They’re on web pages, built into browsers, toolbars, on mobile phones, on your Windows or Mac desktop. Everywhere. Why browse through a directory or menu when its so easy and effective to search?
So, how does this apply to your own website? Well, if your potential customers are used to navigating the web by searching, then it makes sense to let them navigate your site via search functionality as well.
At miggle.co.uk we take two approaches to providing site search. One is that we build it ourselves, the other is that we use a customisation of Google search. The first approach, the self-build, is useful for sites that have a database of information - classified sites like estate agents or recruitment agencies fall into this bracket. The second approach, the Google customisation, is useful if your site consists of a number of articles, particularly if articles you write on your site are published in two places, such as through your blogging tool and your content management system.
The Google customisation is what we currently use on the miggle.co.uk website. The installation we’ve used is free to use, the trade off being that our search results also display Google Adwords (which can be mapped to our Adsense account so we can earn money from it). However, we could pay Google to remove the Adwords all together. From a display stand point there’s quite a bit of flexibility too and we can also define to some extent how search results are displayed, as well as what we want indexed in our search engine. And like all great current web products, we can invite collaborators to add to our search customisation too. Find out more about Google Custom Search.
We’re currently focusing on our ‘Responsive Websites Solutions‘ approach - looking at building sites for small businesses or sole traders which puts them in control of their online presence. Providing site search to the solution is a key part of this, along with a raft of many other ‘must haves’ for web sites which are focused on ensuring that any online presence we build is always highly usable and highly relevant.
If you’ve got an up and coming web project and would like an informal chat, feel free to get in touch.
