Search

One of the meetings that I attended was a work-group on some education programs.

The nature of the group and what we are doing are quite immaterial. To cut a long story short, we are gradually developing a website for people working in our field to seek professional information on clinical practice – treatment guidelines, practice protocols, performance index for auditing, and even asking the expert for specific advice.

A key item on our agenda this time was, therefore, to discuss various issues about the site.

We ended up spending quite some time to check the site and test the hyperlinks, with an aim to make sure the site is user friendly and useful information could be found when an outsider come to the site and surf.

But, when we were half-finished, one of us suddenly stood up and said, “Hold on, men. Let’s step back and think. People do not come to our site and search what they need.”

“Eh…?” We were surprised. Our subconscious mind realized the truth in his comment, but were not quite certain what our friend was getting at.

“Imagine: What would people do when they have a problem to search on the Internet?” He explained, “They will search in Google! It is quite meaningless for us to polish our site and check all hyperlinks so that visitors could surf smoothly on our site. All we have to do it to see how to make our materials easily searched by Google – and standing out on the top of the search list.

We all nodded – the implication of that remark is profound.