I have recently become obsessed with the way that website visitors search for and find content on large, complex sites. This obsession has left its footprints in our recent VitalSite release. Before we focus on the improvements we’ve made to VitalSite, let’s start by considering how the big players utilize search.
Author Archives: Jennie Ocken
How to Make Web Crawlers Happy
A hospital website is by its very nature a large and ever changing organism. Even worse, there are two dramatically different audiences your website must engage: people and web crawlers. If your website design neglects web crawlers, search engines will take their revenge and no one will be able to find your content. Fortunately, there steps we take – and you can too — to keep those crawlers happy.
It turns out search engine web crawlers are lazy. They spend a lot of time crawling through complex sites, some of which don’t provide a map, trying to understand where the canonical content is and whether content is secure. Here at Geonetric, we do everything we can to make it easy for them so your content is indexed more frequently and accurately. Here’s how.
Build-Measure-Learn with Geonetric’s Form Builder
About two months ago, at the Geonetric client symposium, we launched the beta version of our new Form Builder. This new tool allows our clients to build their own forms and publish them to their websites. Our goal with Form Builder is to provide clients the ability to easily iterate on their form designs, have more direct control over their interactions with consumers and increase the form-related work they can do on their own.
Throughout the process of building this product we have been living our agile principles: learning about the product through direct client input, continuously improving, and using a combination of qualitative and quantitative feedback to determine the priority of new features and refinements.
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Why Context Matters in Building Effective Website Search

Picture it: you’re on a website. You’re looking for a specific piece of information and you’re in a hurry. After looking at the navigation it isn’t clear where the information is. What are you supposed to do? You look around and there, you see it, the solution to all your problems: the search box, of course! You type in your request and press the submit button.
Behind the scenes an entire world of logic, computer processing power, and data spins to life to read your mind and deliver exactly the piece of information you’re looking for. If you misspell a word, it guesses the correct word. If the target of your search is a difficult or unusually spelled word, it uses a phoneme dictionary to identify similar sounding words or names. Search is one of the most complex and data intensive parts of any website. The denser the data, the harder the challenge to identify what the user means — not just what they say — and providing results that satisfy that need.
Building Software for Tomorrow by Listening Today

VitalSite version 13 will be our fourth release in the last two months. With each of these releases we have made incremental progress on making VitalSite easier to use, providing more hooks into the data, and improving how clients can customize their sites. And we plan to continue frequent releases that make VitalSite even better and friendlier.