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:
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, updated 2006-06-05)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G911 - Well House Consultants - Search Engine Optimisation [427] The Melksham train - a button is pushed - (2005-08-28)
[1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
[1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
[1344] Catching up on indexing our resources - (2007-09-10)
[1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
[1969] Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. - (2009-01-01)
[1971] Telling Google which country your business trades in - (2009-01-02)
[1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
[1984] Site24x7 prowls uninvited - (2009-01-10)
[2000] 2000th article - Remember the background and basics - (2009-01-18)
[2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
[2045] Does robots.txt actually work? - (2009-02-16)
[2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
[2106] Learning to Twitter / what is Twitter? - (2009-03-28)
[2107] How to tweet automatically from a blog - (2009-03-28)
[2137] Reaching the right people with your web site - (2009-04-23)
[2324] What search terms FAIL to bring visitors to our site, when they should? - (2009-08-05)
[2330] Update - Automatic feeds to Twitter - (2009-08-09)
[2428] Diluting History - (2009-09-27)
[2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
[2562] Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year - (2010-01-03)
[2686] Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers - (2010-03-20)
[2748] Monitoring the success and traffic of your web site - (2010-05-01)
[3670] Reading Google Analytics results, based on the relative populations of countries - (2012-03-24)
[3746] Google Analytics and the new UK Cookie law - (2012-06-02)
[4121] Has your Twitter feed stopped working? Switching to their new API - (2013-06-23)
G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)
[32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)
[98] No more 'Error 404' pages. Something better. - (2004-10-24)
[109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
[117] A case of case - (2004-11-14)
[142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
[173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
[179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
[182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
[197] Allow for peak traffic on your web site - (2005-02-01)
[202] Searching for numbers - (2005-02-04)
[222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
[259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
[261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
[268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
[274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
[276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
[278] Cover all the options - (2005-04-13)
[284] The Iconish language - (2005-04-19)
[288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
[311] Growth pains - (2005-05-14)
[314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
[320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
[322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
[347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
[348] Graveyard pages - (2005-06-15)
[369] CMS - the minefield of Choices - (2005-07-05)
[376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
[414] Form Madness - (2005-08-14)
[492] New Navigation Aid - Launch of My Wellho - (2005-11-11)
[510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
[528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
[533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
[649] Denial of Service ''attack'' - (2006-03-17)
[658] Keeping the visitors happy and browsing - (2006-03-26)
[681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
[718] Protecting images from theft - (2006-05-12)
[732] Where is a web site visitor browsing from - (2006-05-24)
[757] Horse and Python training - (2006-06-12)
[767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
[800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
[893] Visibility - (2006-10-14)
[916] Driving customers away - (2006-11-07)
[976] Santa at the station - (2006-12-09)
[994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
[1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
[1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
[1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
[1184] Finding resources - some pointers - (2007-05-13)
[1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
[1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
[1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
[1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
[1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
[1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
[1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
[1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
[1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
[1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
[1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
[1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
[1541] Colour, Composition or Content - (2008-02-16)
[1554] Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath) - (2008-02-24)
[1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
[1630] To provide external links, or not? - (2008-05-04)
[1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
[1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
[1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
[1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
[1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
[1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
[1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
[1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
[1888] Find the link - (2008-11-16)
[1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
[1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
[1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
[2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
[2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
[2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
[2333] Formaci[83][c2]ón, de los lenguajes de c[83][c2]ódigo abierto - (2009-08-09)
[2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
[2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
[2336] Forma[83][c2]ç[83][c2]ão, Open Source computador l[83][c2]ínguas - (2009-08-09)
[2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
[2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
[2339] Oppl[83][c2]æring, Open Source datamaskinen spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
[2340] ldning, Open Source dator spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
[2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielill[83][c2]ä - (2009-08-09)
[2389] Writing with our customers words - (2009-09-01)
[2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
[2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
[2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)
[2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
[2668] Is it worth it? - (2010-03-09)
[2981] How to set up short and meaningfull alternative URLs - (2010-10-02)
[3022] Retaining web site visitors - reducing the one page wonders - (2010-10-31)
[3087] Making the most of critical emails - reading behind the scene - (2010-12-16)
[3149] Looking back at www.wellho.net - (2011-01-28)
[3197] Finding and diverting image requests from rogue domains - (2011-03-08)
[3367] Google +1 - what is it? - (2011-07-22)
[3426] Automed web site testing scripted in Ruby using watir-webdriver - (2011-09-09)
[3491] Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers? - (2011-10-21)
[3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)
[3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
[3563] How big is a web page these days? Does the size of your pages matter? - (2011-12-26)
[3589] Promoting a single one of your domains on the search engines - (2012-01-22)
[3623] Some TestWise examples - helping use Ruby code to check your web site operation - (2012-02-24)
[3734] QR codes with marketing logos embedded - (2012-05-16)
[3744] Short Web Addresses for Melksham - (2012-05-30)
[3745] Legal change - You need to obtain user consent if you use cookies on your website - (2012-06-01)
[3776] Some traps it's so easy to fall into in designing your web site - (2012-06-23)
[3896] An email marathon - (2012-10-15)
[3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
[4001] Helping search engines with appropriate 400 error codes - (2013-02-11)
[4076] Web site - fully back! - (2013-04-29)
[4115] More or less back - what happened to our server the other day - (2013-06-14)
[4136] How do I post automatically from a PHP script to my Twitter account? - (2013-07-10)
[4239] Facebook marketing - early experiences - (2014-01-19)
[4376] Well House Consultants, Well House Manor, First Great Western Coffee shop, TransWilts / 2014 web site reports - (2015-01-01)
[4401] Selecting RECENT and POPULAR news and trends for your web site users - (2015-01-19)
[4474] Effect on external factors on traffic to our web sites - an update - (2015-04-26)
[4492] Almost so wrong, but perhaps it's right for some? - (2015-05-11)
Some other Articles
A pleasure to trainWelcoming Leah Davies to our teamUpgrade to the LibraryAcronymsImplementing an effective site search engineWell House Consultants - review of 2004Introduction fees, bonuses, commissions, kickbacksA Change is as good as a restChristmas breakReview of the Autumn