Ed Hoffman just pointed out an interesting search box on the LA times site. When you click on the search box it pops up to a larger box and includes a link to their advanced search.
Before you click

After you click

As part of our site search tips – we recommend making the search box large enough to handle most of your queries. If you’re just not able to afford the real estate then this is a nice compromise. Note: There are other benefits to having a large search box – the most important being a large search box is easier to find. You want it to be easier to find to encourage people to search because typically people who search will convert 2-3 times better than people who don’t.

I think search is less important on a news site than, say an ecommerce site. I think the LA times approach of having a small search box that gets larger when you click on it is sensible. Nice work LA times!

Over the past several weeks we’ve shared with you some of the advice provided in our downloadable “Big Book of Navigation Tips.” Perhaps one of the key take-aways in the Big Book is that your job of enhancing navigation is never done – there are always more improvements that can be made. Product catalogues, buying trends, and customer behaviors all change, and a good retail site is one that keeps up with these shifts – whether seasonal or otherwise.

In the last section of the book, we provide some tips for how you can keep up with the trends and continuously improve your site’s navigation to engage visitors and convert them into happy customers. Below are a couple tips to get you started. You can find the complete set of these and other tips in the “Big Book of Navigation Tips“.

1. Run multivariate tests to continue improving your navigation – As you go through the process of updating your site navigation, you will need to test, test more, and test again. It’s a good idea to test different layout options, refinements, categories, and results orders to make sure you’re providing your visitors an optimal user experience and improving your chances to convert them into customers.

2. Examine your search logs for site navigation option cues – If you’re having trouble deciding what categories you should select for site navigation, looking at what people are searching for on your site is a great place to start. The search terms visitors are using in the search box is a good indication of how they may want to navigate on your site. For example, if there are a lot of queries with manufacturers’ names then manufacturer (or brand) should probably be a navigation option. If people are searching for waterproof products, consider adding this as a navigation option. Your analytics or site search software should be able to provide this information. It’s also important to look at your analytics on a regular basis, as new trends may dictate the need for new categories.

Most likely there is an increase in the percentage of visitors who access your site from a mobile device – whether to research products they may buy later (on their PC or in the store), or to make a purchase on the spot. Navigation is one of the most important aspects of your mobile site, and navigation links – along with the search box – should get prominent placement on your homepage. Navigation on your regular ecommerce site won’t just transfer over to the mobile platform; you need to keep mobile navigation extremely simple and easy to follow so your visitors remain engaged. The more streamlined your navigation, the faster visitors can find what they’re looking for, which can mean more sales (and less abandonment) for you.

Below are a couple tips to get you started. You can find the complete set of mobile navigation tips and more in the Big Book of Navigation Tips. Next week will be our final post on the topic as we wind down this series – but don’t worry, the “Big Book” will continue to be available on our site.

1. Add a search box to the bottom of the page – When visitors scroll to the bottom of the page and cannot find what they’re looking for on the page. You can add a search box and some navigation links to the bottom of the page. This gives visitors an option to easily continue exploring on your site without having to scroll up to the top.

2. Make links large enough to use on touch screen devices – Most mobile devices have touch screens, so make sure your links are big enough for your visitors to click on without accidentally clicking on a different link. Visitors will be frustrated by this if they have to try several times to reach the page they want. If you don’t correct this, they will give up and abandon the site completely.

Just like in a physical store, it’s important to merchandise your navigation pages with information about what products are on sale, the promotions you’re running, what items are marked for clearance, and any other specials that you’re offering. There are a few ways to showcase this information – refinements, banners, and specialized landing pages are a few examples. Below are a couple tips to get you started.

1. Have merchandising-specific refinements – Refinements don’t have to be limited to product details. Visitors want to know what sales items, special offers, bundles and clearance items, you’re offering. Allowing them to refine by these factors is a great way to improve the usability of your site, and guide visitors to items you are promoting, while improving conversion potential.

2. Rank the products in a way that makes sense for your business – Many companies choose to order their products by popularity. This minimizes the amount of clicks people will typically make to get to the products they’re looking for. Consider also showing your highest margin products first, or the ones you have excess stock for.

You can separate the results into “items on special promotion” and “most popular items” for example, or show all items in the same results list, but with the top 5 items in excess stock first followed by the most popular items. We occasionally encounter websites that rank their products alphabetically by default. This is almost always a non-optimal way to rank your products, although it is sometimes a useful sort option.

For more tips, download the full ebook – Big Book of Navigation Tips.

When approaching navigation it’s important to remember that search engine spiders are a key audience. Google, Bing and other search engines analyze site navigation structures as they crawl your site to understand what’s important. For example, if a product page is only two clicks away from the home page it will be considered more important than one that is four or five clicks away. Not only should the pages be able to be crawled, but in many cases they should also be indexed. So be sure to follow SEO best practices when designing navigation pages so they rank well in natural search results.

Below are some tips to help you in this regard. You can find the complete set of SEO tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” available from our website. Next week we’ll provide some tips related to online merchandising in navigation so be sure to check back.

1. Ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines. To ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines, use short URLs that include useful keywords to your navigation pages (e.g., category or subcategories) with very little parameters. Avoid using javascript-produced links because the spiders may have trouble interpreting these. Also ensure that navigation pages are not excluded in your robots.txt file.

2. Include title and <h1> tags on your navigation pages. Customize your title and <h1> tags to include the category title of each category page. These are both located at the top of category pages and are factors that search engines consider when ranking a page. The text in the title tag appears in the search engine results – so it should be accurate, unique and compelling. You may also want to include subcategories within the title tag to help rank for those more specific keywords.

3. When making any changes to your navigation, consider what to do with your old navigation links. The main issue is the old navigation links may have generated great SEO results. You will likely want your new navigation pages to benefit from your old navigation pages’ popularity. The recommended way of handling this is to use a 301 redirect. This will redirect the old navigation links to any equivalent new navigation link. By doing this, the value of the old page will be linked to the new page, minimizing the negative impact on your SEO.

Refinements are an important part of navigation, as they help narrow a broad category so visitors get to items they’re looking for more quickly – and also help them get to particular items to suit their needs such as size, brand, style, or price faster. There is no shortage of options for how to present navigation refinements, which means some retailers offer too many choices or they present refinements in a way that confuses the visitors. Below are a couple of tips to guide you in this area. You can find a whole slew of refinement tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” now available from our website.

Next week we’ll cover SEO, so stay tuned.

1. Consider using sliders for continuous refinements Test the placement of refinements – Using sliders for refinements like price or size range take up less space and are a nice tool to use along with AJAX to build smooth transitions from one information display to the next. Some visitors may find them more complicated than the alternatives – links or drop downs with fixed ranges, or text boxes allowing you to specify an upper and lower limit. So test and make sure your visitors do understand how they work and consider offering alternatives. Make sure your sliders work well on a touch screen device, and if they don’t you can  provide alternative way of displaying them.

2. Make sure navigational images can’t be confused as products – Navigation usability tests were conducted by showing participants a retail site with three product subcategories represented by an image and the associated text description. Many participants misunderstood that  the images were representations and took them to be three product images and assumed there were only three products. You should try to avoid these types of misunderstandings as much as possible. You can minimize confusion on navigation pages by showing products as well as subcategories. You can show other cues that will help differentiate between subcategories and products – such as showing the number of results they’ll see if they click on the subcategory images, label the subcategory images clearly and make sure there’s a clear distinction between the layout of your products and subcategories.

There are companies that guarantee 100% uptime – a bold claim in anyone’s book, but what is this claim really worth? It would be an impressive feat to achieve – but I would be surprised if any provider genuinely managed to achieve this lofty aim.

In our experience we have used providers with such guarantees, and then had downtime despite the promises. This is when you realize that the important part of the uptime guarantee is what the provider offers when things fail despite the promises.

SLI has learned over the years that each component of a system can fail, see our recent blog post The Story of the outage That Wasn’t on how we have enhanced our approach over the 10 years we have been in business. SLI has multiple servers, in multiple locations with multiple hardware, network, and DNS providers to provide resilience when items fail.

When making decisions about your providers, it’s important to look further than the uptime promise. The better providers admit that failures happen and plan for these contingencies, they have transparent communications and are always working to improve their systems.

Most e-commerce sites, and even non-ecommerce sites, have customer ratings and reviews. The ratings give people a quick view at how well a product (or content) has fared among people who’ve already purchased it, and ratings offer a more detailed explanation of a product’s pros and cons. If you’ve already gone to the trouble of having this content on your site, you should maximize its value by making sure it’s included in your site navigation. There are many ways you can go about this, depending on the lay-out of your site and the products or content you feature.

To get you started, below are a couple of suggestions to consider. You can find more by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips” which we just released last week. And be sure to check back, as we’ll post more tips from the Big Book in the coming weeks.

1. Show ratings and review information in the navigation — You can add ratings and reviews as part of the product information displayed on the navigation pages. This highlights early in your customers’  interaction that you provide ratings and reviews, and it’s also good practice to show the number of reviews for each product to illustrate which products have reviews and to help put the ratings into perspective.

2. Provide options to navigate through reviews — If you have a lot of reviews for some of your products, it can be cumbersome for your visitors to read through them. To help your visitors find the information they’re looking for efficiently and improve their user experience, you should offer ways to navigate through the reviews. For example, you can help them quickly access the positive reviews. You can see in the Abe’s of Maine example that the site allows visitors to navigate reviews by pros, cons, best uses and to sort by newest, oldest, highest rating, or most helpful. This is extremely effective, and reduces the amount of steps visitors will take before making a purchase decision.

The relevance of the search results is critical to helping your visitors find the products they are looking for quickly, as well as keeping them browsing to increase the order values.

Last week, Mark Brixton, Country Manager for Australia, sat down with Phil Dobbie from BNET Australia to discuss 10 things ecommerce sites can do to keep their site search performing efficiently. Mark explains that site search accounts for 30-40% of a site’s revenue so there’s a huge benefit to making search a priority. Mark also highlighted the fact that etailers should be continuously monitoring their analytics to understand visitors’ behavior on the site and particularly within the search. You can listen to all of Mark’s tips on the BNET site: http://www.bnetau.com.au/blog/aussierules/10-ways-to-improve-your-on-site-search-btalk/8381.

For more tips on how to improve your site search and navigation, download our e-books:

• Big Book of Site Search Tips
• Big Book of Navigation Tips

The rugby world cup is coming to New Zealand next month and the biggest news story recently has been about the price of the All Black jersey. The jersey retails for NZ$220 in New Zealand (about $182 US dollars), but can be bought from our customer, World Rugby Shop for just US$89.00. The New Zealand public has been outraged and there has been a backlash against Adidas who have failed to justify why there is such a huge difference in price. I’m sure our customer has benefited greatly from the publicity.

I suspect that Adidas’s market research indicated that Kiwis would be willing to pay more than the rest of the world for their team’s jersey. However somehow Adidas neglected to take into account the Internet. At best this was naive. And they now have a lot of work to do to rebuild the damage to their brand, although they’ll probably sell more jerseys as a result of the publicity, even though it’s negative.

The broader question is what should Adidas have done and how should manufacturers set prices around the world? Should there be a global recommended retail price? If I look at the price of an iPad in NZ it is about 30% higher than in the US. I think most of that difference is due to the US dollar dropping significantly in value since the prices were set. In my mind there shouldn’t be a significant difference in price. You have to assume that the consumers know how to use the internet and will find out and the market research should take that into account.

If Adidas had set the price a little higher in the US and significantly lower in NZ then they would have sold less jerseys in the US and more in NZ, but they probably would have made more money overall and they wouldn’t have damaged their brand. However, they wouldn’t have got this publicity, so there may not have been as much interest in the jersey. Obviously international pricing is difficult to get right.

What do you think? In the meantime I’m going to go buy one of those jerseys from our customer.