Adding a search feature to your site

By Keith

Adding a search feature to a Web site, so that visitors can find items of interest on that site via a regular form, is both a useful and an impressive trick. It stands to reason that any Web designer would like to be able to offer that to their clients, but most tend to assume that it involves a huge amount of highly technical work. The good news is that it is actually surprisingly simple, at least when the help of third party search services are used. A number of companies offer search features which can be built into individual sites, providing direct, fast searching of a stored index of all the words in the pages of that site. The search feature offered by Atomz comes in both a commercial and a completely free form, and can be built into a site in just a few minutes whether you’re an experienced Web designer or a complete rookie.

This tutorial covers the entire process of adding a free search feature from start to finish, and shows how to achieve this in both the designer-friendly Softpress Freeway and the programmer-friendly Macromedia Dreamweaver. Download demo copies if you don't have them: Softpress Freeway, Macromedia Dreamweaver

Begin the Workshop

Taking things further...

Search for related product updates:

Freeway

Dreamweaver

End Result This search feature took just a few minutes to add to the site, from the initial Atomz registration process through to building the form structure and linking it to the remote index of the site. Visitors can find the pages they want quickly and easily, and the site owner can see reports of what’s been searched for and when, and how many pages were found.