Some time ago, Urban at Miguru Media contacted us about a project he had wanted to do for a long time – a directory service for Yoga in Sweden where the visitor was the focus. The goal was to create an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand website where you can quickly and easily get information about different Yoga actors.
We chose to use Wordpress as a platform to quickly build the website. The choice of platform saved us a lot of time, allowing us to focus on developing the important core features.
One of the key elements of the site’s function was to be able to quickly find information on the site, and here WordPress’ built-in search functions were not quite up to scratch. We therefore developed a completely new search function for the site based on Apache Solr. Solr is a very powerful search engine with which you can create a search that works the way you want and which can easily be combined with other functionality – regardless of information architecture. This also allowed us to build a geolocation feature to customise the content of the webpage depending on the city you are in. In addition, search results – in this case if you were searching for a yoga studio, for example – results near you would appear first in the search results.
It was also important that visitors, yoga teachers, and people active in the yoga movement can easily participate in the website and add new studios, teachers and trainings. Therefore, we also built features for users to do so, without having access to the site administration where you normally add content in WordPress.
How we improved the search function.
In simple terms, Solr is a bit like having your own Google on your own website. Unlike the built-in search function in WordPress, you can control the search results very well, so that you can give much better and more relevant hits when you search because you can make Solr understand the content of your website much better.
This makes it much easier to find the information you are looking for, especially when you have a lot of information on the site.
Geolocalisation
The geolocation feature we built on the site adapts the content displayed entirely to where the visitor is located, if you are in Stockholm, you are probably more interested in yoga studios in Stockholm than studios located in Malmö. Therefore, we prioritise content and push what is most relevant to the city you are in so you find it first.
This makes it much faster for the visitor to find information about Yoga in the part of the country they are in, than if you would, for example, sort by name in alphabetical order.
Front-end editing
By allowing users to help keep the site up to date with everything that is happening in the yoga world, it becomes much easier to keep the information relevant and updated on the site.
It also makes for a much better visitor experience and people who work with yoga can also make sure that their particular studio, teachers and trainings are included and visible on the site. When you normally work with WordPress, you work in an “admin section” where things are obvious to an experienced web editor, but perhaps not as obvious to a new user. By supplementing this functionality so that you have both the admin section for administrators but then also an “outside” for ordinary users, you create a user-friendly site that feels like a natural work tool.
Hope you like the site!