Tips for single-vertical experience

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1

Hi team,

I’m building an Answers experience for a client who wants to start with FAQs only. They are interested in adding additional entity types down the road but want to keep it to a single vertical for the initial launch. Their main goal is for Yext Answers to replace the current FAQ page on their website.

To optimize a single-vertical experience, I wanted to make sure the following is possible:

1. Start the experience on a vertical page - In order to take advantage of the facets, I want the Answers Experience to start on the FAQ vertical page after a user submits a query. With only FAQs, a user should never need to switch vertical tabs or navigate to the universal tab. I plan on telling the client to use “[production URL]/faqs” for the redirectUrl parameter when integrating. Is this the right approach?

2. Hide the navigation bar - I plan on hiding the navigation partial on both the index and the FAQ page. Are there any concerns if the navigation is missing?

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Thanks for your insight! Any questions let me know.

Max

2

Hi Max,

Yes, this is definitely possible and people do it all the time!

  1. You just want one page in the experience and in this case it looks like you have two – an “index” page and an “faqs” page. Instead, you should delete your current index page and rename what is currently “faqs” as “index”. When you delete and rename, make sure you are doing it for both files in the config/ and pages/ directories in tandem. You could choose to keep the FAQs page named /faqs if you’d like – just keep in mind that pages that are index.html have special behavior in browsers so we recommend it for any “homepage”-like experiences.

  2. You can hide the navigation by commenting out or deleting the navigation partials in the html.hbs file for the page. Don’t forget to remove both the script and the markup.

Let us know if you have any other questions!
Liz

3

Hi Liz,

Thank you for the clear explanation! Easy to follow and looks great on staging.

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However, on production, I’m getting an error I can’t place. The results don’t load. “Error: Vertical search request failed”

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Is there a step that I missed? Thank you for your help!

Max

4

Hi Max! Just make sure your PRODUCTION search configuration is pointing to a configuration version that has the “FAQs” vertical specified, and you should be good to go!

5

Thanks Amani! That worked. Much appreciated!