In search of the elusive widget
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

There was a wonderful hardware store in Glastonbury that was a fountain of esoteric ironmongery knowledge.  You’d wander in with a widget that needed replacing and they would turn it over slowly and say ‘right, you’re going to need a need a 3/8th inch spigot with a 3/8th inch British Standard Whitworth male screw thread on each end‘. And they’d turn round to a shelf packed with small cardboard boxes and find a replacement within seconds.  ‘That’ll be 75p please‘.  Alas, the store has long gone and with it a lifetime of widget knowledge.  In those pre-internet days, I took in what had broken and they rapidly identified it and were, more often than not, able to replace it.

The other day I needed to buy an electronic component.  I couldn’t find the right website via Google, as my search enquiry sent me to endless directory websites. And then I thought why not just search for the image instead? The web equivalent of handing my widget over the counter to a man in brown overalls. I found it on the first page of Google images.  I was so grateful to have found the lead, that I purchased it on the spot.  I didn’t cross reference it in price comparison websites to find the cheapest price. Because the shop had added alt tags to their images, I was able to find it visually rather than on a traditional text based search – and the ease of that search turned me into an impulse buyer. Moral of story – make it easy for your customers to find your products and add .alt tags to your pictures!