Dansbury, who was formerly the worldwide on-site search program manager for HP.com, shared her thoughts about a CafePress community of more than 200 million products that receives an average of about 11 million unique visits every month and within which some users make their living.

Dansbury told Zamora that the large size of the CafePress community presented challenges, as the company has at least one product available matching most of the words in a dictionary, making it important to have strong algorithms and a well-defined implementation of best practices.

A recent rebranding of the CafePress site also presented challenges that Dansbury spoke about, and she told Zamora how on-site search can play a key role in moving customers from a landing page to exactly what they are looking for.

Dansbury also pointed out how customers quite often aren’t interested in the methods of how they reached what they wanted within CafePress, whether through on-site search or through SEO or SEM, and how instead they are simply looking for answers.

Before leaving, Dansbury told Zamora about the popular CafePress blog, recent promotions such as presidential election meters tracking candidate-related sales, some of her favorite items on the site, and shared her thoughts about PubCon as a conference that attracts a more technical group than others.

Contributed by Lane R. Ellis, Lead Editor at SearchEngineWorld.