Adding Search Facility to the Site - May 2nd, 2008

Usability is a quality attribute. On the web, it is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use the number of visitors start decreasing. It strongly affects the number of return visits.

There are many factors involved to improve a website’s usability. We have discussed website navigation before. Today I will discuss adding a search facility to the site. It is recommended to have a search facility if a website has a large number of pages and covers a wide variety of topics.

Having your own search engine helps visitors to find what they are looking for, without going to different pages. Users just need to type in the keywords for what they are looking and they should be shown the exact pages on the website.

Study shows that more than half of web users are search-dominant, which means they prefer to use a search box to find what they are looking for rather than navigating through links.

Here are some guidelines to be considered when setting a search facility on your site.

• Search function should be easily available on every page of the website.
• It is recommended to have a search box on each page rather than a link to the search page. If it’s not possible to have it on each page at least it should be on your home page.
• The search box should be placed in an easy to find location. Based on observations it is recommended to have it on top right corner of the page.
• Try to make a search box wide enough to accommodate the user’s queries.

Finally, please note that both search facility and navigation are important for the website’s usability.

Nadeem
SEO Programmer

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CSS 3 Preview - November 12th, 2007

CSS 3 has been in development for a long time and in 2008 new releases of web browsers are set to implement CSS 3 standards. Just as you would expect not all browsers will support all the standards and no doubt IE will interpret them different!
To give you a sneak peek there are actually a couple of things that have already been implemented in some browsers that I can show you. The following are the new elements that I think are really good.

Border-radius:
It’s the one we have been waiting for, it’s the rounded edges! Because i don’t want to alienate any users i have taken screen shots of the work so that all users can see it.

This new feature is long overdue in my eyes but now it’s here its good because it now eliminates the need to use images to create rounded corners on divs and it now makes it easier to re-create tabbed navigation that has rounded corners. This can be done because you can select which corners you want to be rounded and how rounded you want them. Below is an example of only two rounded corners.

Box-shadow:
Box shadow is another cool feature that will reduce the need for creating images to make a website look better. Box-Shadow is what it says, it places a shadow on the edge of a div were you want it, You also have good control over what type of shadow you have and how sharp or soft it is.

As well as making the web look nice the biggest advantage to having these features are that they eliminate the need to have images all over to give things good effects. In return this reduces the size of your page which means the page can load faster. In the age of broadband you may not see a massive difference in page load time but if you don’t have the luxury of broadband then you can tell the difference. This opens up your site to a wider audience and makes it more accessible.

Gary
SEO Programmer

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