Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

I am going to enter rant mode today and talk about a style of site design that I see almost daily. If you have a product or service to sell you will want to maximize the impact of your site. If your site looks poor and is almost unusable then people are very likely to simply drop off and go elsewhere. So why do I see apparently rich successful businessmen and Internet marketing experts making sites that look like they were created in 1993?

I thought I would break down the sort of things that these sites do and give some suggestions on how to go about solving each one.
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Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

For a long time now, there has been a lot of buzz around the concept of the Semantic Web. A great deal of resources has been poured into researching viable solutions to the issue of linking together data on the web with meaningful meta-data and relationships. Unfortunately, even in the W3C’s own words, most of the ideas or standards coming out aren’t close to being implemented fully. This is why I don’t see it as the ‘next big thing’ for the web which so many of us are waiting for. Read the rest of this entry »

Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development

Website usability should be an essential part of your online strategy, but it is so easily overlooked or overshadowed by pretty design. Here is a quick list of 7 things that can cause your users to get frustrated and go elsewhere.

1. Search
Search is a very important part of any site, and if it doesn’t work then your users will just get frustrated and go to another company. Website search usability comes in two parts, the search box itself and the results.

When creating a search box you need to have a single text box and a button labeled "Search". That is about as complicated as you need to go, although it is okay to have a drop down box of categories, as long as the default is "All Categories". When the user has done a search, the search box should contain what they searched for, so that they can refine their query if the need to.

The second part of search usability deals with the results. When a user has completed a search the results must be displayed in a clean and concise manner, using only the most relevant search results. No user wants to have to sift through hundreds of pages of results just to find what they are looking for. Also, the ideal search strategy shouldn’t just be relevancy, the best search engines should combine relevancy of result with how many times a result was clicked on.

Of course, if your site only consists of a few pages then this probably doesn’t count all that much, you should just make sure that your navigation is usable.
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Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

Better browsers such those found on the G1 and iphone have contributed to the growth in mobile internet access. What factors should you consider to make your website more usable for users of these mobile devices? When people are using mobile devices to access the web they are more likely to be looking to find information quickly and specifically. You can make their search more fruitful by considering the following points. Read the rest of this entry »

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development