|
You can customise your site search
results screen to match the look and feel of your website by changing
the value of the hidden input header and footer fields from "Default"
to your own code.
*Before
you begin* print
out this screen for reference.
There are two hidden fields in the
search form, called header and
footer. These hidden fields control the look and
feel of the results screens your users get.
*Tip*
If you don't know how to edit hidden fields in forms, you probably
shouldn't be trying this. Try and get some help from someone in your
organisation who knows how to edit hidden fields in forms, or ring us
on our FREECALL number 1800
065 754 and we
will try to help you.
The relevant lines of site search code
look like
this:
|
<INPUT TYPE=hidden
NAME=Header VALUE="Default">
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=Footer
VALUE="Default">
|
The hidden fields contain the value
'default' which tells our system to return a standard look and feel
for the results screen.
You should replace the word 'default'
with any valid HTML text - it's the HTML you put in to replace
'default' which will customise your results screen.
The header field defines the look
and feel, including text and link colours, as well as the background
colour of the screen.
Example of setting up
the Header content - a string of single quote HTML tags inside
one normal double quote
tag:
|
<INPUT TYPE=hidden
NAME=Header VALUE="<HEAD><TITLE>Customising your
search results screen</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR='#FFFFFF' LINK='#FF0000' ALINK='#FFC200'
VLINK='#8F3802'> ">
|
The above example is how
this screen looks, with a white background, red links and brown
visited links.
The footer field should contain
your site navigation and links back to the main areas of your site.
All links back to your page must be absolute URLs.
Example of absolute URLs in part of the
Footer
content:
|
<A
HREF='http://www.yourname.com.au/'>Home</A>
<A
HREF='http://www.yourname.com.au/search/'>Search Your
Name Again</A>
|
Important notes
on customising your header and footer
There are some important
rules to follow when inserting your own HTML header and footer code
to ensure that the results screen displays properly.
If you take any HTML code from your
website and add it to the default header and footer fields you will
need to make some modifications to it for it to work.
Be sure to edit in the HTML source code
view of your WYSIWYG editor, or edit in a text editor rather than a
WYSIWIG editor. WYSIWIG editors may add extra spaces, change the
code, and generally think they know better.
As the Header and Footer code is a
string of HTML tags inside one HTML tag, all
the double quotes in your string of header and footer code
must be changed to single quotes - and then the whole string
is encolsed in one set of double quotes (see Header example
above).
Some other
important points to note.
- The header field should contain all
of the HTML from the start of the document up to and including the
body tag. The header field defines the colour of your background,
links, text etc. If you have images defined in this area, all
links to the images must be absolute.
For
example:
|
<IMG
SRC='http://www.yourname.com.au/images/logo.gif'>
|
- The footer field should close the
HTML document correctly with </BODY> and </HTML>
tags.
- If you add links in the header or
footer to other parts of your site, you must use absolute URLs,
not relative URLs. This is because the results page of your search
comes from our server and not your own. Modifying the header and
footer fields in the search input form tell our server how to
output your results.
For example:
|
You must use
absolute URLs
<A HREF='http://www.yourname.com.au/search/'>Search
Your Name Again</A>
Do NOT use
relative URLs
<A
HREF='/search/'>Search Your Name
Again</A>
|
Troubleshooting
For more tips on building your site
search inside a frameset, customising your site search results
screen, and absolute versus relative anchor references, please visit
our troubleshooting
screen.
See some
examples
Many cultural organisations already
use the Culture and Recreation Portal's search services. Have
a look at how other cultural organisations
have implemented the site search on their websites and customised their
results screens.
|