Optimizing Search Forms and Search Form Results


In Chapter 13, Using FrontPage Components, you learned how to make a Web searchable by using FrontPage s built-in Web Search component. FrontPage makes it easy to go a step or two beyond the default search options to fine-tune the way search input is presented, as well as how search results appear. Customizing the search form or the search results makes sense when you want to limit the part of your Web that is searchable, or when you want to cut back on the amount of information your visitors receive. Follow these steps:

  1. Right-click anywhere within the search form, and select Search Form Properties.

  2. In the Search Form Properties tab, adjust the data input fields as needed:

    • Enter new text in the Label For Input box if you want to provide users with a more personalized, playful, or specific label ”such as Search Our Web or Search The Catalog ”than the default Search For Label.

    • Enter a different number in the Width In Characters box if you want to give users more room (or less room) to enter search criteria. Adding more room might be useful if you want to give customers the option of searching by lengthy product names and product numbers , for instance.

    • Change the label for the Start Search button box to something more personal and unique than the generic Start Search text. If your Web site is youth-oriented, for instance, you might change the label to Find It! or Go For It!

    • Change the label for the Reset Button box to something different only if you feel Reset isn t specific enough ”you might change it to Start New Search, for instance.

  3. Click the Search Results tab (see Figure 15-6), and change one of the options that determine how search results are presented:

    click to expand
    Figure 15-6: Specify how search results are presented to the viewer using this dialog box.

    • Change the default term All in the word list to Search Box if you don t want visitors to search all files in your Web (except those in hidden folders). If you want visitors to search only a sales catalog, for instance, enter the name of the folder that contains the catalog files instead.

    • Change Date Format or Time Format to another format ”or to (None) ”if you don t want date stamps or time stamps to be presented.

    • Select Display Score (Closeness Of Match), if you want visitors to see a score along with each file listed in the search results; the scoring mechanism assigns a numeric value to the result according to how relevant it is to your search criteria.

    • Deselect Display File Date or Display File Size, if you don t think visitors need to know the date a file was created or last updated, or how big the file is in kilobytes. Most search results don t include the file size , and deleting it keeps the search results simpler.

A way to gain an even greater degree of control over search forms and results is to create the form from scratch, and use a custom script to process it, as described in the following section.




Faster Smarter Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003
Faster Smarter Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003
ISBN: 0735619727
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 179

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