A very significant part of my efforts to get my template store up and running goes in its search engine. I am surprised myself how well it works. My bespoke client work is the test case for it, and whenever I start out on a new slide, I give the search engine a go, and voila, most of the times a suitable lay out pops up.
Business presentations are a bit like business English: you actually don't need a big vocabulary of layouts ("words") to make a decent deck.
You can use the search engine to you advantage without shelling out a dollar to buy a slide. Simply search for a concept, and maybe you can "borrow" the design that comes up, or the search results remind you of slides you designed before.
Here are some examples of how you can use the search engine:
- Look for a business concept, anything to do with talking about the competition
- Find specific well known strategy frameworks: 7S, Porter forces, etc.
- Search for a specific layout: Venn diagrams, 2x2 matrices
- You need a slide to visualise 4 things: look for the number four
- And you can always try your luck with using SlideMagic as a stock image engine (try Stormtrooper), images on SlideMagic are free to re-use
I am monitoring the search terms people use closely. If a key concept is missing, I will add the slide, if a keyword does not match a suitable slide, I will fix that. At the moment, I am constraint by the search engine in the eCommerce platform that powers my site, which means that I need to work with keyword tagging of slides. As SlideMagic grows, I envision migrating to a custom search engine that can offer higher levels of intelligence. Ultimately, this will be the real differentiation of the site: coming up with the right slide layout on request.
Photo by Kyle Popineau on Unsplash