Our website search tool – bad news, good news

The world of search engines is changing and the Ecology website is experiencing the shift. Google is discontinuing their Site Search product, the tool Ecology has been using on our site since 2015. (Our previous search engine, USASearch, was also retired. Apparently this is a trend.)

Google’s process for discontinuing this paid service is to transition accounts to the free version of their search tool, Google Custom Search. The free version is supported by advertising.

The bad news

On October 9, Ecology’s search account was downgraded to the free Google search tool. This means ads began appearing at the top of our search results pages.

• Ecology has no control over which ads display. We do not sell ads, select ads or have any ability to filter the ads that display.
• The ads you see may be influenced by your search history. If you have a Google account and you’re logged in, Google may be “remembering” the topics and types of sites you look for and visit.
• We have no options for a free tool to replace the Google search. If the ads are too disruptive, we can completely remove the tool from our pages. This would mean no ability to search from within our site.

The good news

Ecology is in the final stages of building a brand new website. This site will feature a new search tool that's integrated with our new content management system. We do not have a launch date scheduled yet, but our plan is to go live before the end of the year.

We will continue to monitor our search results and evaluate their impact on our site’s usability. If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us!

On the road to a better Ecology website

Help us improve our website!

This study has closed. Our next web usability study will be in January when we'll be testing a draft layout (wireframe) of our new site!

You may have noticed we’ve been doing a lot of testing on our website.

Ecology is three months into a year-long journey to not just improve our website, but to completely rebuild it. Our goal is to make it easier to use. That’s where YOU come in! We need to keep checking with you, our web users, to be sure we’re on the right track.

What are we testing this time?

We have a SECOND draft for a simpler web structure and we’d like to know how well it works for you. Can you take 10 minutes to help us?

We’ve come up with a rough outline of how we might organize the content on our new site. It’s still just a sketch and doesn’t include everything yet. Think of it like a map that, so far, only has the major highways penciled in.

We’re using an online tool called Treejack to help us evaluate the grouping and labeling of our content – kind of like the territories and road signs on our map. It will show us which pathways users take to find specific types of information. It’s a quick exercise and fun, too. There are no right or wrong answers — we’re just trying to see how people think about the content on our site. When you try it you can enter to win one of four $25 Amazon gift cards.

Let us help you to help us!

If you’d like to participate in trying out our proposed structure but need some assistance, please schedule an appointment to complete this same exercise verbally through our ADA coordinator, Hanna. You can reach her at (360) 407-7668.

This web usability study will run October 17 - 21.

Thank you in advance for your participation! You are helping us reach our destination, a better Ecology website!

If you have questions about our usability testing, contact Cally Whiteside, Ecology Web Team @ cally.whiteside@ecy.wa.gov

Counting on our Website

by Cally Whiteside, web design and usability specialist, Ecology communications

We know we count on our website to share information about the work we’re doing. But we'd like to know more about what our web visitors are counting on. So we're conducting a usability study this week. One part of the testing is happening on the website itself, and you we hope you participated!

Online usability testing

If you visited our website recently, you probably noticed a pop-up message that asked for your help. We used a web tool called “Loop11” that asks volunteers to complete a set of 7 tasks using our website. The information we gathered will give us a better picture of how well our navigation, content and site design work for our visitors.

The quiz was on the site for approximately one week. We also conducted in-person testing so we could observe how our visitors use our site and see where we can improve it.

Our website comes of age!

Our website will turn 21 this year! It was first launched in August of 1994. At that time our entire web fit on a single floppy disk. (Remember floppy disks?) It’s grown considerably since then. We now have over 11,000 files. It’s closer to 40,000 if you count PDF files. That's a lot of information!

In 2014 our website was visited nearly 7 million times. We averaged about 19,000 visits per day. That’s a lot of visitors! And we'd like them to be busy, successful visitors; definitely not frustrated visitors. If you count yourself as a user of our website, we'd appreciate your participation in our online testing. Help us improve our web.