Agency Case Study For Office Use Only:
Design & Search

19+

design awards

up to 90K

indexed entries per client

Cross-platform

search design

Overview

What to do when your design-minded clients want a sleek-looking website with a state-of-the-art search?
For Office Use Only knows a thing or two about it. The New York-based creative agency has worked with an array of high-profile clients, such as The Noguchi Museum, HOK, and AIA New York. So, it has taken on the challenging task of reconciling advanced technology with unique project design time after time with panache.

A highly-customizable search tool is key to the online presence of companies with conceptual flair and individual branding requirements. Therefore, the creative agency was looking for an on-site search solution that would incorporate these features:

  • Flexible search settings such as typo tolerance, auto correct, synonym handling and search fuzziness (i.e. adjustable search precision);
  • Fast indexing, with the ability to re-index on demand when a new page must be immediately up;
  • Potential to map results, so that when users search for a popular query (such as "projects"), they are automatically re-directed to the most relevant page or section of the website.
  • Ability to remove default CSS and skin the default structure of various search result elements to apply the customer's own branding and build exactly what they want.

Site Search 360 addressed all of these into our collaboration with For Office Use Only.

View the search they designed for the Noguchi Museum
    for office use only logo
    noguchi museum logo
    hok logo
    ayer saint gross logo
    aia logo
    double-quotes

    What I always like about crawling versus some kind of backend search is that Site Search 360 is looking at the site the same way a human would be looking at it.

    5-star-rating

    Louis Walch
    Technology Director, For Office Use Only

    The challenge

    Building a search functionality for customers with complex sites, i.e. where content is spread across multiple domains or platforms.
    If we take the example of the Noguchi Museum, their main site is on WordPress, while their online shop is powered by Shopify. Besides, they have various types of information available on their website, from text-heavy articles presenting exhibitions or recounting the story behind each invididual artefact, and so on, to visually rich archives that feature photos (magazine covers and newspaper excerpts) as well as videos.

      19+
      design awards
      Up to 90K
      indexed entries per client search
      Cross-platform
      search design

      Get in touch

      Sign up for free

      The solution

      Site Search 360 can search through different properties and present them, either compartmentalized into categories or mixed altogether, in one interface.
      What's also important is the ability to sculpt the data however we like it with the use of data points (e.g. publication year, an event's date, the price of an artwork) as well as focusing the crawler on specific areas of the page to which we want to pay attention.

      We achieved this by identifying all page elements that shouldn't come up in search, that is, that shouldn't be indexed. Then we add a custom 'noindex' CSS class to them. Finally, we add a rule, either with CSS or XPath under the Data Structuring > Content Extraction tab located within the Site Search 360 control panel to ignore the items with this particular class when the Site Search 360 crawler (re)indexes the website.

      Account management

      At Site Search 360, we understand the challenge of managing multiple stores. As an agency, you want to be able to easily access each account, and effortlessly switch between them.

      Agency solution

      If you're an agency, we can assign a specific Agency Role to your account so you benefit from having multiple independent search projects under one umbrella while your customers have limited access to their search projects.

      This set-up ensures that you stay in control of overall billing details and that your clients do not have access to the other sites which you manage. Reach out to the Site Search 360 team to see how it could simplify your account management process.

      "[T]o me, features like typo tolerance, auto correct, synonym handling, etc., are important in taking the decision about which search tool we use."

      photo technology director for office use only

      Louis Walch
      Technology Director,
      For Office Use Only