Developing a Page to Help Users Search Your Web

 

Some Background.  The Corporate Presence Wizard has built-in routines to ensure that you get a Search page in your web.  This page is named, search.htm.  This can be very advantageous for a user that doesn't want to take much time browsing your web, it can help them move more directly to where they want to go.

For example, here on this campus, there is considerable competition for who should get top billing or near to top billing on the Quinnipiac web.  But if there was a good search facility available, users could definitely improve their ability to find things like the baseball team, department home pages with curriculum information or the Quinnipiac University Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management Institute (QUESBMI).

In FrontPage a web developer is able to insert a Search Form object into a web page so that a web will be searched for a particular string of text.

The steps for doing this follow.

  1. Make sure you have a location where you want the Search Form to appear on the page.

  2. Click on the Insert menu.

  3. Select the Components item in the menu.

  4. Select the Search item that appears on the submenu.

This should cause a dialog form to appear that looks like the following.

 

 

Here, you can change the basic set up of what the user sees next to the text box where they should enter their text, the width of the text box and the labels on the buttons.

If you click on the Search Results tab then you will get the following form.

 

 

You can restrict the word list.  You can also get it to consider dates and times, which should be unimportant for our web.

When you click on OK your page should look something like the following.

 

 

I have put my search form in a single table cell in order to move it off the left margin.  This is a typical, probably almost useless, design choice.

In order to make sure your search word list is up to date you want to

  1. Click on the Tools menu.
  2. Select the Recalculate Hyperlinks item on this menu.

This should be done when you make any sort of major additions or removals to your web.