Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

Gone are the days when a separate version of a web site was required to see a web-site. Many 3G Phones, such as the iPhone and Android compatible phones  support rendering of web pages in their full glory (except for Flash on the iPhone). While this creates the richness that one expects when you are surfing at home on your laptop or desktop computer. It can still be difficult to navigate around a large web pages. If you really want to make your website usable on a mobile phone it might be a better idea to go for a mobile version of a website.  Domains are available for mobile websites and  it is a good idea to buy the .mobi domain for your mobile website to host your mobile version of your website to show you are really serious about providing mobile content.

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Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
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