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
G911 - Well House Consultants - Search Engine Optimisation

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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
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