web design tips
 

web design tipsMaking Searches Simple.

One sticky point with many websites is this: they have absolutely terrible search engines. It does make sense, in a way, as searches are complicated to program for, and it takes time to write or implement a search engine on your site. Still, if you do search badly, it's worse than not doing it at all.

Stick to Conventions.

If you look at the established search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest - you'll see that they follow a clear set of conventions when it comes to displaying search results. The titles of pages are large, underlined blue links, and they're followed by an extract from or description of the page, and then the page's URL. It looks like this:

Title of first search result
... here is the text where the keyword was found in the search
result. the keyword will be in bold...
http://www.example.com/articles/123

Search results are ordered most relevant first, and are split across pages if there are a lot of them. The search box should remain at the top of the page with a search button, in case the user wants to edit their search. There should also be an 'advanced search' link, to help users make more complicated queries to your search engine (for example, pages that contain one thing but not another, or only pages in a specific section of the site).

There are many more conventions - study established search engines in some detail to figure out which ones will be important to you when you design your search. However much you might feel like it's bad to just copy the search engines, they all copy each other anyway, and the reason they do it is that consistent interfaces are a big aid to usability.

Learning from PageRank.

Google's idea of ranking pages by link popularity (that is, the number of pages that link to them using a keyword) is a good one, but lots of people seem to have forgotten it. Why? Well, because it doesn't work all that well for indexing the whole web, where it's easily gamed. When you're doing searches across your own website, though, where you control the content and no-one can try to distort the link rankings, it's a technique that works much better than counting the number of times keywords occur in each page. Of course, this assumes that your site links to other parts of itself well (it should, for the sake of rankings in the real search engines) and that your site is reasonably large.

Installing Search Software.

At this point, you'd have a big project on your hands if you decided to write your site's search engine yourself. It's much better to take an existing, open source solution written in whatever language your site runs on, and then adapt it to your own purposes in whatever way you need to. Good places to look for open source site search software are sourceforge.net and freshmeat.net, which both allow you to search by language and sort results by the popularity of the software.

Outsourcing Search.

Finally, if you don't want to go to too much trouble with your site search, you might consider outsourcing it altogether: that is, making your search box send the user to the search results for your site at an external search engine. More and more sites with outdated or useless search engines are starting to do this, realising that they're putting off users by forcing them to use bad search engines.

If you want to offer a Google search for your website, go here: http://www.google.com/services/free.html. Yahoo and MSN offer similar services, but they're nowhere near as popular. You should really only consider outsourcing your search as a last result, as it looks amateurish unless you pay to customise it with your logo and design, and it may also have the unintentional result of sending your visitors back out onto the web instead of keeping them on your site. Still, if you really don't have the time to spare to make a good search, it can be a useful alternative to have.

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Web Design
◦ 5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments.
◦ 5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look.
◦ 6 Reasons Why You Need a Website.
◦ 7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better.
◦ A Question of Scroll Bars.
◦ Ads Under the Radar: Linking to Affiliates.
◦ AJAX: Should You Believe the Hype?
◦ All About Design: Principles and Elements.
◦ An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro.
◦ An Issue of Width: the Resolution Problem.
◦ Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts: Content Management Software.
◦ Beware the Stock Photographer: Picking Your Pictures.
◦ Building a Budget Website.
◦ Building Online Communities.
◦ Clean Page Structure: Headings and Lists.
◦ ColdFusion: Quicker Scripting, at a Price.
◦ Column Designs with CSS.
◦ Content is King.
◦ CSS and the End of Tables.
◦ Cut to the Chase: How to Make Your Website Load Faster.
◦ Designing for Sales.
◦ Designing for Search Engines.
◦ Dreamweaver: The Professional Touch.
◦ Encryption and Security with SSL.
◦ Finding a Good HTML Editor.
◦ Focus on the User: Task-Oriented Websites.
◦ Fonts are More Important Than You Think.
◦ Free Graphics Alternatives.
◦ FrontPage: Easy Pages.
◦ Hints All the Way.
◦ Hiring Professionals: 5 Things to Look For.
◦ How Databases Work.
◦ How the Web Works.
◦ How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs.
◦ How to Install and Configure a Forum.
◦ How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites.
◦ How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy.
◦ How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat.
◦ IIS and ASP: Microsoft's Server.
◦ Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More.
◦ It's a World Wide Web: Going International.
◦ JSP: Java on Your Server.
◦ LAMP: The Most Popular Server System Ever.
◦ Making Friends and Influencing People: the Importance of Links.
◦ Making Searches Simple.
◦ Offering Free Downloads on Your Website.
◦ Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software.
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◦ Perl: Cryptic Power.
◦ Photoshop: a Graphic Designer's Dream.
◦ Picking a Colour Scheme.
◦ Printing and Sending: the Two Things Users Want to Do.
◦ Putting Multimedia to Good Use.
◦ Python and Ruby: the Newer Alternatives.
◦ Registering a Domain Name.
◦ Registering Your Users by Stealth.
◦ RSS: Really Simple Syndication.
◦ Setting Up a Mailing List.
◦ Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer.
◦ Some Places to Go For More Information.
◦ Taking HTML Further. HTML might seem like a simple language for web documents, and to an extent, it is - that's what it was intended to be. If you know what
◦ Taking HTML Further with Javascript. Once you've built your HTML pages, you might need them to do something a little more interactive on the client-side (that
◦ Taking Your Website Mobile.
◦ Text Ads: Unobtrusive Advertising.
◦ The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation.
◦ The Art of the Logo.
◦ The Basics of Web Forms.
◦ The Basics of Web Servers.
◦ The Case Against Flash.
◦ The Confusing World of Web Hosting: Making Your Decision.
◦ The Evils of PDFs.
◦ The Importance of Validation.
◦ The Many Flavours of HTML.
◦ The Smaller, the Better: Avoiding Graphical Overload.
◦ The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes.
◦ The Web Designer's Toolbox.
◦ The Web is Not Paper.
◦ There's More than One Web Browser.
◦ Time for User Testing.
◦ Titles and Headlines: It's Not a Newspaper.
◦ Tracking Your Visitors.
◦ Understanding Web Jargon.
◦ Uploading Your Website with FTP.
◦ Using Flash Sensibly.
◦ Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic.
◦ VBScript: Javascript Made Easy.
◦ Websites and Weblogs: What's the Difference?
◦ What Do You Want Your Website to Do?
◦ What You See Isn't Always What You Get.
◦ Which Database is Right for You?
◦ Why Doing It Yourself is Best.
◦ Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away.
◦ Why Word is Bad for the Web.
◦ Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format.
◦ Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions.
◦ Working With Templates.
◦ Writing for the Web.
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