Ive been pillaging my red folder marked redesign this evening. A portfolio which now documents at least a year of irregular, on-and-off sketching frenzies. I like the way the design has evolved on paper, and I’m reassured that on the whole I still like it (even if I can’t suss out how to balance the conflicting pulls of minimising my design, whilst cramming in all sorts of syndicated personal content).
There’s one part of my design that I immediately questioned though, and you can help.
Search. On a blog. Ignore for a moment the variable quality of search in blog applications, and focus on Why. Please, raise your hand if you go to someone’s blog and use their Search function. How often? Why do you do it?
I ask, because it’s become very much the norm to give our internal site search boxes extremely prominent positions in site designs. As you can see over the Christmas period, mine is currently blocking out a very pretty Christmas tree; perhaps it’s a little like French motorway billboards (but with Christmas, HTML and Hoth instead).
And heres where I’m going with this: Do we need search on every page? For a fairly small Blog? Really? I wonder if it be more appropriate to link to a dedicated search page, and then display the search box on results pages as well (to allow for easy refinement or changing of search terms).
Thoughts please world.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.