My latest project was to implement a redesign of the PeoplePerHour “Find Freelancers” page.
Previous Design
New Design
Why is the new search better?
- It’s twice as fast
- Many less DB queries per page (old: >100, new: 10)
- Less page reloads needed (results refinement via AJAX)
- Uses faster DB queries, less table JOINs and better indexes
- It returns more relevant results
- It supports multiple keywords and uses Natural language full-text search so ranking takes into account proximity and duplication
- Users get feedback about why a result was returned (keyword match highlighting)
- It’s more powerful
- More search options, e.g. search on hourly rate of provider.
- Returns more information, e.g. provider earnings, hourly rate
- It has better SEO
- Used fairly nice URLs, higher keyword density, better HTML markup, better code to content ratio.
- Added links to “Related queries”, “Popular queries” and “Top Searches by sector”.
- The user-interface and page layout has been improved. (UI built with JQuery).
- Users can now link to any search (cut&paste URL)
