How you search on www.prestigewhisky.com

How you search on a website pretty much epitomises the success or failure of the web design process.

I think that it is true to say that we took a lot of time over getting the look, feel and search experience of Prestige Whisky as good as we could on the budget that was available at the time. We were extremely lucky that the designer we used (BWeb based in Woking who I have mentioned here before) was both patient and brilliant and I think that the result we created punches well above it's wait in a number of crucial areas outlined above.

However, since launch I've certainly got a bit lazy with regards the sites search function - basically knowing where everything sits on the site I tend to go straight to the item I want and by pass the search box (top right of the screen) altogether. When I do use it, it's to type the first three letters of a brand to get quickly to a item I know is there ('MAC' for Macallan, 'STR' for Strathisla etc). Yesterday morning though I had two calls from separate customers who'd both arrived at our site and used 'search' as intended - they were both independently looking for 40th birthday/anniversary gifts and rang to check stock availability (one bought, the other didn't). Both had searched using the magic box and come up with the whisky they wanted.

The ironic thing is that although it is perfectly possible to search by brand, year, age, abv, region - in fact practically anyway you can think up on the website none of this functionality we actually intended - we just got lucky with a good designer and really function website. In fact we expected at outset most visitors to search using the region tabs to the left of the screen - which to my knowledge very few people actually do.