WikiStudent Blog

I’m reading Don’t make me think for the third time (It’s a book worth re-reading - I learn new things from it each time). Quoting from page 31:

There are five important things you can do to make sure your users see – and understand – as much of your site as possible:

1. Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page
2. Take advantage of conventions
3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas
4. Make it obvious what’s clickable
5. Minimize noise

The dynamic menu tree (if I can just get it working!) will be THE feature to indicate the clear hierarchy of the site. At a glance you’ll be able to see how big the site is (i.e. how many pages) and how they all fit in in relation to each other.

I’ve just spent over 5 hours trying to get the menu tree working, and the code still won’t find the JavaScript or image files, but it does load the CSS. Many others have had difficulties with the installation, and I read the entire discussion about this, but still can’t find a workaround for myself.

This menu tree is absolutely vital to the site. I want it more than anything! Here is an example of a website that uses this menu tree. You can expand and collapse the folders as needed. This is perfect for WikiStudent, which will have over 100 Unisa modules in the menu, which don’t all need to be visible at once.

I’ll have to wait till next weekend and try again then. Maybe there will be more help on the MediaWiki talk page by then. Holding thumbs!

I’m only on page 88 of my Advanced Web metrics with Google Analytics book. (Still over 250 pages to go). Here’s an interesting quote from page 84:

Site Search Usage

The Site Search reports contained in the Content section of Google Analytics are dedicated to understanding the usage of your internal search engine (if you have one). For large, complex websites with thousands, and in some case hundreds of thousands, of product pages, having an internal site search engine is critical for a successful visitor experience - no navigational system can perform as well as a good internal search engine in these cases.

At the very least, site search reports are a form of market research - every time visitors enter a keyword into your search box, they are telling you exactly what they want to find on your website. Marketers can use this information to better target campaigns. Product managers can use this as a feedback mechanism for designing new features or adding new products.

A report on the search terms used by visitors on your website is clearly powerful information for your organization. However, understanding where on your website a visitor reaches for the search box, what page they go to following a search, how long they stay on your site after conducting a search, whether they perform further search refinements, whether they are more likely to make a conversion, and whether their average order value is higher are also vital clues that can help you optimize the visitor experience.

Good points. I’m in fact using this blog’s search box to do this very analysis, though I can see one can get much more information by using GA and Google’s internal search engine. Fortunately there is a MediaWiki extension for this, which should be quick to implement. I’m so busy with testing right now that I haven’t yet had a chance!

I’ve now finished reading one of my new computer books I recently ordered online: Building Findable websites.

Here’s a quote from page 152, which illustrates the importance of search boxes:

Search has become an indispensable means of navigation for most users. During usability test sessions I’ve watched users pass up very conspicuous, logical navigation systems in favor of search to complete every task. Search is more than an added convenience; it’s an essential tool that users expect to find on sites.

After thinking some more on this topic, I realised that the WikiStudent search box is even more important that I first thought, for this reason: WikiStudent is going to use MediaWiki and will closely resemble Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, how do you find stuff? By typing something in the search box! Wikipedia doesn’t have the structured navigation that WikiStudent will have, which is what’s making me believe that students will go straight to the familiar-looking search box. I’ll be working at making sure that you can find absolutely everything on the website via that little box!