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| E-Commerce Essentials with Microsoft® FrontPage® Version 2002 |
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Chapter 7: Adding Search and Navigation Links continued
Adding Search
Link bars are only one tool for making a Web site more easily navigated by prospective customers and clients. A far more important tool, and a must-have element for any e-commerce site, is a way to search your site's contents.Studies prove that making a site searchable is the single most important navigation tool for any Web site. Your shoppers will be expecting a way to locate specific items or information based on keywords they enter in a form that lets them search the contents of your site.
Normally, it takes complex programming to index the contents of a site so you can create a search form that actually works. But FrontPage's Search Form template comes ready to work and makes use of a special programming utility called a Search bot that FrontPage uses automatically. Your job is to customize the search page and keep the index up-to-date.
When you create a search form by selecting it in the Page Templates dialog box (see the following section), you only have to link it to another page on your site in Navigation view. You don't need to customize the standard contents, except to delete the placeholder text at the top of the page.
Click to view graphic
Figure 7-10. A search form, an essential element of any e-commerce site, is automatically enabled using FrontPage's Search Form template.
How FrontPage's Search Function Works
Let's move step by step through the process of making a site searchable so you can understand exactly what's going on and, more importantly, make the search process work better for your customers.If your Web site is hosted on a Web server running the FrontPage Server Extensions, FrontPage automatically creates a text index drawn from all of the words contained in your Web site's pages. When you save a page in your site, FrontPage adds any new words to the text index. The index is cumulative: New words are added to the index, but old ones are not removed.
When a visitor enters a keyword into the search form and submits it to your site by pressing the Start Search button, FrontPage checks the text index and displays a list of hyperlinks to the pages containing the search text. The list of results is weighted — in other words, the closest matches are listed first.
Updating Your Text Index
Keep an eye on your site's text index periodically, especially if you delete text or entire pages. When you create pages, FrontPage automatically updates your index. But when you delete content, FrontPage doesn't remove text from the index.
You can have FrontPage notify you when your text index needs to be revised, however. First, open the web in FrontPage. On the Tools menu, click Options to open the Options dialog box. On the General tab, select the Warn when text index is out of date check box, and then click OK. Now, whenever you open the web to edit it, FrontPage will notify you if the index is out of date so you can recompile the index.
To manually recompile the text index, open the web in FrontPage. On the Tools menu, click Recalculate Hyperlinks. A message appears to notify you that FrontPage is about to check hyperlinks in the web and synchronize web data, a process that could take several minutes. Click Yes. That's all you have to do. FrontPage then does the updating in the background so you can go on with other work.
Adding a Search Form to Any Page
You don't need to use the Corporate Presence Wizard to create a search form. You can use the Search template if you want to have a separate page solely devoted to searching. Or, you can open an existing page and add the Search Form Web component. The Web Component command enables you to add a simple search form to any Web page. This makes your entire Web site extra easy to navigate — from any page; the user has a simple form from which to conduct a search. The search form takes only a few minutes to configure.To add a search form:
- Start FrontPage, and open the page you want to contain the search form. Click inside the page at the spot where you want the search form to appear.
- On the Insert menu, click Web Component.
- In the Component type list, click Web Search to select it, and then click Finish.
- Change the settings in the Search Form Properties dialog box if you want, and then use the Search Results tab to change the way the results are presented (see the following section).
- When you're done, click OK.
The Insert Web Component dialog box opens.
The Insert Web Component dialog box closes and the Search Form Properties dialog box opens. This dialog box allows you to change the label that appears next to the search form, the size of the search form, and the buttons that appear next to the search form ("Start Search" and "Reset" are the defaults).
Click to view graphic
Figure 7-11. Customize your search box label and size using this dialog box.
The search form is added.
By default, the search form includes instructions on how to use the form and query language results visitors can use to find what they want (see Figure 7-10 for an example). You can cut out all the instructions if you want the search box and its accompanying buttons to appear all by themselves.
Customizing Search Results
The Search Results tab in the Search Form Properties dialog box lets you change the way search results are presented. The default selection All appears in the Word list to search box because this enables your visitors to search the entire contents of your Web. When they conduct a search by entering keywords in the search box and pressing the search button, the search engine scours the text index of your site, and then returns a set of results.
Click to view graphic
Figure 7-12. The default search results include the titles of documents that contain the search keywords, the date the document was last modified, and the size of the document.
By clearing the options on the Search Results tab of the Search Form Properties dialog box, you can change the search results. You might want to simplify the results by removing the date, for instance.
If you want to restrict the search to a community forum or other discussion area, enter the name of the folder that contains the group's postings. Select the Display score check box if you want to assign a rank to the results of the search — each item on the search results page that is returned to your visitor gets a ranking based on how closely the contents match the search terms. The closest matches are ranked near 100%; matches that aren't as close are assigned lower percentages. You can also select the other check boxes if you want the search results to include the date and the file size of the file being matched. (It's an extra nice touch for visitors if they know that the file is especially large in size.)
Last Updated: August 16, 2001
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