Over the past year, the Improvement Service has redeveloped its website in an effort to ensure the site better serves the needs of its users. Work was undertaken to improve the site framework to allow introduction of new technologies, to increase the accessibility of the site and to ensure content can be located through clear, consistent navigation and labelling.
The most recent development phase has involved the enhancement of the search facility on the site in line with user research conducted earlier this year. The key new features added to the search include keyword search for all words, any words or for an exact phrase; search refinement by adding keywords to an existing result set and filtering searches by document type including web pages, PDF documents, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations.
A key feature worthy of its own mention is that through user choice, search results can be presented from the Improvement Service site and/or from a number of other sites that have been chosen for their relevance to the local government sphere. Sites also indexed include Scottish Government, IDeA, Audit Scotland, COSLA, SOLACE and Product Share.
In an effort to make the search easy to use, work has included improving the look and feel of the interface and providing help on each of the features. Search choices can be made simply by ticking boxes and each feature has its own section within the layout to help make these choices clear.
The search results page has also been improved and now includes highlighting of alternate results to help make them easier to read, bolding of search keywords, numbering of results, a graphic icon preceding the title to show the document type of the result and the web address of the page which also shows which site the result comes from (if the search spans across multiple sites).
Finally, to access the advanced features simply type a search keyword into the search box on any page and click on 'Go'. On the results page, the advanced features are presented on the left side of the screen, ready to help refine the search further.
For further information on the search function or any IS website feature please contact Martin MacKinnon, Web Development Manager.
