Site Search - News and Blog

Marks & Spencer revamped its website last year, and enjoyed a successful Christmas online, increasing its web sales by 78% in the 13 weeks to the end of December.

The M&S website scored badly in a usability study last year though, so there may still be room for improvement to the user experience.

We've identified 10 areas of the site that M&S may want to take a look at...

Online retailers and other website owners still have plenty of room for improvement, as some are still guilty of some avoidable usability problems.

Jakob Nielsen recently said that terrible websites are less common now, but an investment in improving user experience can still pay off, with average ROI around 83%.

We list ten common usability problems found on all kinds of websites...

Shoppers using an e-commerce site have two main ways of finding the exact product or service they want – the navigation bar and the search box.

While many sites have great navigation, there are plenty whose search options return some pretty poor results. 

More evidence of the effect poorly functioning websites can have on etailers’ customer relations – this time from a poll of US consumers by Harris Interactive.

The survey found almost nine out ten respondents have experienced problems when making a transaction online, and 42% of those that have defected to a rival or abandoned the process.

Multi-channel retailers are mounting a challenge to the online dominance of their pure-play rivals despite tending to offer a lower level of site functionality, according to research.

The study, by eDigitalResearch, which uses mystery shoppers to rate UK shopping websites, found Play.com and Amazon.com continued to generate the best overall response from consumers.

However, multi-channel players like Tesco, John Lewis and M&S were seen to have stronger customer service.

Publishing brands Penguin and Dorling Kindersley, both part of the Penguin Group, recently completed a project to relaunch their websites and improve interaction and navigation for users.

The revamp was pretty far reaching - the team took a user-centred approach, with extensive usability testing and planning, and found new ways to think about marketing books via the site.

The group is also set to launch new sites to increase its engagement with customers - one is a youth-oriented site called spinebreakers.co.uk, which is employing teenagers in its development. 

Here, Penguin and DK's online development manager Jeanette Angell speaks  about the reasons behind the project and the techniques it used.

Google is to make its custom search engine available for small businesses without ads.

The tool, which allows webmasters to limit queries to a certain set of documents, on one or more websites, will cost between $100 and $500 a year, depending on the size of the business.

Yahoo! engineers had to start fixing a bug in a new live search feature, just a day after announcing the addition.

Yahoo! Search's Kevin Lee introduced the new Search Suggest function, which offers suggestions on search terms as a user types.

There has been much discussion and comment recently about the quality of online customer experiences. Even small companies, run by specialists in their chosen field, need to provide a good online experience if they are to capture a share of the rapidly growing online spend. 

Here’s my novice's guide to improving the quality of your online experience... 

Volkswagen's US marketing web team has made changes to the way its pages are constructed following an intervention from Google.

VW.com had been featured by Google's Enterprise blog last week for making search front and centre of a new design.