First technical changes to the Harvey Mercheum website for the new year, and they are great!

It is common knowledge that the WordPress Search Module does not work very well, and so a number of plugins and other solutions exist to improve upon it. Long-time readers of the Mercheum Blog know that I am a fan of Google’s offerings, and so I looked into Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE) when I first set up the website. The resulting search box looked fine on my smartphone:

but not so good on a desktop PC:

Continuing my learning of CSS, I have now cleaned up the box produced. It takes up less room on my smartphone:

and looks much better on desktop:

The second change I made was to how the search results are displayed. When I first set up the GCSE, I used the “Overlay” Layout:

In gathering the Google Analytics data for the 2019 top exhibits post, I noticed that the Search data did not seem to be being collected properly. I have changed the Layout to “Two page” so that a new page is displayed, with a query parameter in the URL:

I hope this resolves the data collection problem, and does not cause any problems for you, my readers. What do you think of these changes? Leave a comment below, or use the Contact the Curator form to let me know!