[Part 2 in my "Free Lunch with Google" posts series]
Now that your website can accept donations and sell products to benefit your non profit, its now time to focus on your website's usability.
At onLine, we review a lot of non profit websites, so we're always on the look out for the elements every website should have, the large donate button, the non-pixelated logo, the mission statement, etc. One feature that surprisingly is not often available is the "search bar".
It use to be that for a site to be able to have a search bar, code more complicated than basic HTML was required. Or, if you're non profit that was built on a CMS platform, an additional fee was likely required to activate it. Well, Google is sharing their search expertise with everyone for free. Enter Google Custom Search.
From Google Search Engine product page:
With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.
With several pages of galleries, on the field stories, board members, and products on your website, inserting Google Custom Search will help make things easy for the visitor to your site find exactly what they are looking for. To view some examples, visit Google's Picks, a list of businesses and organizations using GCS [link].
Setting up is uber-easy. After you've created your account, your control panel lists several customization options including "Look and feel", "On demand indexing" (allows you to submit a select number of pages to be quickly indexed) and "Code" (includes the HTML code that you can insert into your site wherever you want the search bar to appear).
Typically, like most of Google's offerings, the tool displays advertisements that would appear along with your search result unless you upgrade to the paid version, Google Site Search. However, for non profits and educational institutions, Google allows you to disable advertisements. Which is great! In doing this, Google gives you the option to have a clean search results page, or if you want to bring in some additional funds to you non profit, you can keep the advertisements and make money on your searches (this requires signing up to Google's Adsense for Search program [link]).
Thanks for the insight into GCS. It is difficult to keep up to speed on what is available.
Posted by: Mark Waterfield | February 03, 2009 at 01:37 PM