More purposeful and meaningful searches!

We just launched a user experience enhancement on the search utility on the VeriSign website. While by default the search feature still looks the same, it now functions a little differently.

If you click the search icon without inputting a search term, it no longer takes you to the search results page with results for the default search field copy "Search". Instead when you click the search icon, the cursor on-focuses into the Search text field clearing the default instructional copy "Search" and displays the blinking insertion point prompting you to input a search query. The experience is slightly different on some browsers where when you click the search icon without inputting a keyword, the default copy "...

There is a lot of debate sometimes on whether to create a non-JavaScript (JS) version of a web page to support users without JS.

This can seem like a no-brainer initially as it would seem that everyone has JS enabled. The percentage of users online with JS disabled is a mere 2-3% depending on where you look. JS functionality is also supported on the mobile platform which is growing steadily. And besides, how unexciting would it be to traverse the web sans JS - imagine all the cool functionality you would miss!

All that aside though, site owners can sometimes only gleen analytics on users with JS enabled to improve the user experience. But, the reality is that some users just don't like JS for privacy reasons or they don't have JS support because they have an...

We recently simplified the search results page on VeriSign.com and some EMEA sites (Spain, Germany, Switzerland, U.K., and France). Now, results display without the "cached" link and page size. On further examination of these elements, they were not offering much value-add information to users when viewing the search results.

Future improvements are underway which will add more usefulness to the search results page and enhanced usability.

We've been seeing some interesting trends in the mobile access to our VeriSign.com website. The number of people visiting the site from a mobile device has been steadily increasing in an upward trajectory. This is probably not surprising given the onslaught of mobile phones and tablets with superior web browsers which render sites as well as on a desktop computer.

The devices most users are accessing the site from are the iPhone, Android, and iPad. The majority are new visits, and the average time on the site and pages per visit are comparable to visitors from a desktop computer. While the percentage of mobile visitors compared to total visits to the site per day is still relatively small, it is nonetheless indicative of a growing trend which is likely to keep growing.

Here...