Menu Structure

The website works like most modern websites and uses nested menus to make navigating around the content easier. However, it is easy to miss that there is information on web pages which have sub-menus, such as Home and History Centre. The menu entry History Centre, for example, has a sub-menu History Centre Content, Visits and Open Days, …) and it easy to miss that History Centre is also a web page with content. Likewise, ‘History Centre Content‘ has a sub-menu and it too has its own information.

Searching BAHS Website

It is possible to do text searches across the whole website. When using the search option (at the bottom of most pages) typing in the words spring outing will try and find all examples where these two words appear together. It will then list all pages where the words appear separately (they may appear on the same page but not together).

The text search described above doesn’t include pdfs (such as the Glaven Historian) in its results so to find text in these you need to open the relevant pdf and do a search using the pdf reader.

Using Google Advanced Search

Another powerful search technique is to use the advanced search options of a search engine such as Google as this will include any pdfs that are on the website that are accessible by the any visitor to the website (but not any pdfs only accessible to members).

Like most software that is powerful it takes time to master. To try it out follow the steps below: Click here to open the Google advanced search page.  This will open in a separate tab or page. There area  lot of options but the simplest way to search the BAHS website is to follow the guidance below.
1) To restrict the search to the BAHS website in the field ‘site or domain:‘ enter bahs.uk
2) In the field ‘this exact word or phrase:‘ enter the search term you want enclosed in speech marks. e.g. “Innkeepers and Blacksmiths of Blakeney”. Whilst this search contains a long phrase it is better to start with a shorter phrase.
3) now click on the button ‘Advanced Search‘
Naturally, getting the most out the Google advanced search option requires a study of the options avaiable and trying them using search terms for which you have a good idea of the results expected (as the example search above “Innkeepers and Blacksmiths of Blakeney” did). Whilst the above descriptions focuses on this website the techniques apply to searching any website.

Some pdfs may have been created using images where any words in the image are not recognised as words but are just part of the image. For these pdfs a text search will not be successful and the search engines are unlikely to index what appears to be text in the pdf.