Topics Include: I'd Like to Buy a Snow Storm - How Much Will that Cost?, Search Best Practices, Meet Hodgson's Marketing Team

I'd Like to Buy a Snow Storm - How Much Will that Cost?

A middle aged man who owns a small company walks into a shop and says to the shop keeper behind the counter, "I'd like to buy a snow storm, how much do will that cost?"

The man replies (in his best, "this parrot is not dead", Monty Python accent), "Well, that depends Sir, what kind of snow storm are you looking to buy?"

"There are types?" the man states, confused.

"Yes, many", he replies. "They start with 'dusting', that's the cheapest, move into mid level, 'noticeable and annoying', then get to enterprise level, 'historic and epic' and the largest is what we like to refer to as 'The ridiculous snow storm' - which one did you want to look at?"

Being a man who likes the best in everything he naturally responded, "Can I take a look at the 'ridiculous snow storm'?"

"You can," replied the shop keeper, "but I need to warn you, if we start down this road I will need to review your financial statements and get a credit report, might even need to have some kind of collateral down."

"Credit report, financials - are you mad, it's a snow storm!" exclaimed the buyer.

"Oh Sir, Sir, you underestimate the cost of a ridiculous snow storm.

Snow storms of this nature will paralyze traffic, close schools for weeks, stop those hard working employees from getting to work and stop businesses from functioning in the most basic of ways - Work from home you say, not likely, with a ridiculous storm power will be lost so all those telecommuters can't function from home either.

Deadlines will slip and right when you think you're good to start earning money again the Government will close for no reason, and boom, another storm hits 3 days later (which is why we call it a ridiculous snow storm rather than the epic) and now your back to sitting at home in the cold again.

So you see Sir, a snow storm of this type is very, very expensive.

Now based on your business being a small business and the amount of disruption the 'ridiculous' storm will cause, I have to say, and I'm very sorry to say, you just can't afford it.

Hot chocolate instead?"

I'm glad to say Hodgson survived our ridiculous snow storm with what I hope was a minimum amount of disruption to our clients. For that, I am extremely grateful to our team of employees who made it in to the office, or who worked steadfastly from home, and kept our projects on task despite unplowed streets and downed power lines.

Search Best Practices

Since the recent snow storms had a lot of us searching for many things - lost cars, small children, our sanity - I had plenty of time to think about what makes a productive search. While I'm not sure I've got much insight into snow searches, Louis Rosenfeld, author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, recently posted this list of best practices relating to search that I thought was worth reviewing:

• Keep the initial search query user interface very simple.
• Make sure your search query is in the same location on pages, and that it's on all pages.
• Allow query refinement, and allow query refinement that fits the needs (if a search produces 0 results, don't offer to refine the query).
• Show just enough information per search results to let users get the information they need (either just by viewing the results page or by letting them know if they should click through to the actual page).
• Support result sorting (chronological, alphabetical, etc), if it helps.
• Teach your search engine to recognize regularly occurring queries for specific types of information such as names of people, products, unique IDs, and configure search results accordingly.
• Ask for feedback on search results pages - both quantitative and qualitative (e.g., "rate you satisfaction with what you found; if not satisfied, what would you have liked to find?"
• Learn what your most frequent queries are; then test their performance regularly.
• Learn what queries fail most frequently, and fix them.
• Manually create recommended search results for the most common queries.

Today's web users are becoming less tolerant of having to dig through a site to find the information they need. A well designed search interface will make significant difference in how effectively your site engages visitors. If you'd like any assistance in redesigning your current search queries so that information on your site is easy to find, let me know. If you need help finding your car or your small child, you're on your own.