Our web site started small - perhaps half a dozen pages about 10 years ago. Since then it's built up from 6 to 60 to 600 to (now) approaching 6000 pages as we've added extra services such as our solutions centre, our open source help forum and its archives, and the daily diary of which this page forms a part. Information about our courses is also very complete, and you'll find almost anything you want to know about Well House Consultants in our resource centre.

But how can we make it easy for you to find what you need? We try to ensure that no page is ever more than three clicks away, and a clear navigation system helps. But with the best will in the world, these principles that work well for a small site aren't so effective as it grows ... and we expect it to continue to grow.

When our web site size hit 60 pages, we added a simple search engine that went through the text of each page and let you look for search terms on the fly. It worked excellently, and it still worked well when the site reached 600 pages. By the time we were approaching 6000 pages, though, it was beginning to run out of steam; the server load was high (to the extent that it was timing out at busy times of day), and as parts of the web site data migrated from plain pages into MySQL databases, they were no longer found by the search mechanism.

In the past few days, I've updated the search facility on our website and it's now available through the search box that appears on virtually all of our pages - or try it here:

Enter search word(s)

The new mechanism includes a tailored search to look through each of the areas of our site as relevant (and to eliminate as may repetitions as possible - for example between full and summary course page listings), and also searches the MySQL databases. Matches are sorted not only by relevance, but also by the area of the site in which the hit occurs; a truely tuned search engine. If you enter a search term that fails to match (or only matches one or two times), our engine will suggest alternative searches, in each case suggesting only words or terms that actually occur on the site. Phonetic matching helps to ensure that you'll be offered good alternative words even if you mis-spell your initial term, and the system even looks for two words in one in case you've run your search words together.

If you're looking to improve your own site search, there's some technical information available on how our new engine now works and on how we suggest alternative search terms. You can learn about the technoligies we use on our PHP course and our MySQL course; I present both of these personally and will be very happy to talk with you about searching.

Our new mechanism is some 200 times faster than the system it's replaced, and is extensible. It will see us through the way to 60000 pages and perhaps to 600,000.
(written 2005-01-01 08:52:41)

 G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility
  [2668] Is it worth it? - (2010-03-09)
  [2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
  [2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
  [2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)
  [2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
  [2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
  [2389] Writing with our customers words - (2009-09-01)
  [2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielillä - (2009-08-09)
  [2340] ldning, Open Source dator språk - (2009-08-09)
  [2339] Opplæring, Open Source datamaskinen språk - (2009-08-09)
  [2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
  [2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
  [2336] Formação, Open Source computador línguas - (2009-08-09)
  [2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
  [2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
  [2333] Formación, de los lenguajes de código abierto - (2009-08-09)
  [2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
  [2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
  [2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
  [2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
  [1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
  [1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
  [1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
  [1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
  [1888] Find the link - (2008-11-16)
  [1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
  [1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
  [1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
  [1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
  [1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
  [1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
  [1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
  [1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
  [1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
  [1630] To provide external links, or not? - (2008-05-04)
  [1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
  [1554] Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath) - (2008-02-24)
  [1541] Colour, Composition or Content - (2008-02-16)
  [1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
  [1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
  [1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
  [1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
  [1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
  [1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
  [1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
  [1184] Finding resources - some pointers - (2007-05-13)
  [1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
  [1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
  [1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
  [1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
  [1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
  [994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
  [976] Santa at the station - (2006-12-09)
  [916] Driving customers away - (2006-11-07)
  [893] Visibility - (2006-10-14)
  [800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
  [767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
  [757] Horse and Python training - (2006-06-12)
  [732] Where is a web site visitor browsing from - (2006-05-24)
  [718] Protecting images from theft - (2006-05-12)
  [681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
  [658] Keeping the visitors happy and browsing - (2006-03-26)
  [649] Denial of Service ''attack'' - (2006-03-17)
  [533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
  [528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
  [510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
  [492] New Navigation Aid - Launch of My Wellho - (2005-11-11)
  [414] Form Madness - (2005-08-14)
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [369] CMS - the minefield of Choices - (2005-07-05)
  [348] Graveyard pages - (2005-06-15)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
  [320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [311] Growth pains - (2005-05-14)
  [288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
  [284] The Iconish language - (2005-04-19)
  [278] Cover all the options - (2005-04-13)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
  [202] Searching for numbers - (2005-02-04)
  [197] Allow for peak traffic on your web site - (2005-02-01)
  [182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
  [179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
  [173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
  [142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
  [117] A case of case - (2004-11-14)
  [109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
  [98] No more 'Error 404' pages. Something better. - (2004-10-24)
  [32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)
  [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)

G911 - Well House Consultants - Search Engine Optimisation
  [2562] Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year - (2010-01-03)
  [2428] Diluting History - (2009-09-27)
  [2330] Update - Automatic feeds to Twitter - (2009-08-09)
  [2324] What search terms FAIL to bring visitors to our site, when they should? - (2009-08-05)
  [2137] Reaching the right people with your web site - (2009-04-23)
  [2107] How to tweet automatically from a blog - (2009-03-28)
  [2106] Learning to Twitter / what is Twitter? - (2009-03-28)
  [2045] Does robots.txt actually work? - (2009-02-16)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [2000] 2000th article - Remember the background and basics - (2009-01-18)
  [1984] Site24x7 prowls uninvited - (2009-01-10)
  [1971] Telling Google which country your business trades in - (2009-01-02)
  [1969] Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. - (2009-01-01)
  [1344] Catching up on indexing our resources - (2007-09-10)
  [427] The Melksham train - a button is pushed - (2005-08-28)

Back to Well House Consultants - review of 2004

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Acronyms

A pleasure to train
Welcoming Leah Davies to our team
Upgrade to the Library
Acronyms
Implementing an effective site search engine
Well House Consultants - review of 2004
Introduction fees, bonuses, commissions, kickbacks
A Change is as good as a rest
Christmas break
Review of the Autumn