Hello Fellow ChartWatchers!
Last weekend I had a great time giving our SCU 101 seminar to a room full of people at the Dolphin Hotel in Orlando. One of the questions that came up during that seminar was "What does the solid black candlestick mean? I've looked all over your site and I can't find anything that talks about what the different candlestick colors mean."
OK, that is a very good question. It's also a question that our support team sees quite often from other users. And it is an important question that everyone needs to know the answer to. I was glad to get that question during the seminar, but I decided not to answer it directly.
Instead, I took the opportunity to show everone in the room our "Search" feature. Why? Because we rewrote it last year and it works really well however many people either don't use it or they don't use it correctly. I can make that statement because, like the candlestick question, many of the questions our support team gets each day are already answered on our website.
I told everyone at the seminar to go to our homepage, find the "Search the Site" box on the right side of the page, enter "Candlestick colors" into the box, and press the "Search" button. Here is what the results of that search look like:
Because we programmed this search feature ourselves, we control the order of the results that you see and we can tweak those results so that the articles that are more interesting to chartists like yourself appear first. (Our old search feature was hosted by Google and Google's results weren't nearly as useful.)
The first article listed on that search results page is a direct answer to the question that was asked in the seminar. The "SU" icon beside it means that the answer was written by our Support staff and is stored in our Support Knowledgebase. The next couple of articles are labelled "CS" for "ChartSchool" and are general articles about candlesticks and candlestick patterns. We then have a link to an educational Video ("VID") about candlesticks from Arthur Hill and finally a Blog ("BL") article that Arthur wrote last November re-explaining how candlestick colors work.
So these search results are pretty useful to someone who is trying to understand how candlestick coloring works on our website. When everyone at the seminar saw this, they immediately started searching for the answers to other "great mysteries" they had always wanted to know. In other words, they had learned how to "fish."
I encourage you to take a moment and do this search yourself and then dig into some of those articles and videos and see what you discover.
Later, during the lunch break, several people told me they were very glad that I made them try the Search box because they had already discovered several new tricks and tips on their own. That was great news to my ears. It's also another example of the kind of real world value that most seminar attendees get during our courses.
So please remember to use our Search feature whenever you need help using our website. You'll be amazed at all the things you'll find.
- Chip
