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Adding a Search Facility to the WCDA WebsiteIt is often quite difficult to find all the useful information in a website once it gets bigger than a few pages. The ability to search across the site for a particular word or phrase can help the reader find what they are looking for. Big sites have specialist pieces of programming added to allow this to happen. For a smaller site like WCDA, this is a lot of work, and not always technically possible depending upon where the site is hosted, as running the necessary programs might not be allowed. I came across a hybrid solution wich uses a simple piece of automatically written coding, which is added to the basic webpage. This draws the box in which the search text is entered, and then uses Google to do the search, but limited to within your own website. There are a range of customisations which can be applied to the search methods. When a search is performed a page is produced with the found items, with some linked adverts, and then clicking on a link brings you back to the appropriate WCDA page . The site is at Digitalpoint, and the page automatically generates the HTML code required. Copy it and paste it into your own page. This is what I use for here.
And this produces a search box like this:
The advantage is that there is very little to add to the WCDA site and the search work is done by Google, the down-side is that we have to wait for Google to index (catalogue) new pages before they are searchable, and I am not sure how long that takes. (update: it seems to be less than a week, not bad!) Maybe sometime in the future I will have a go at adding our own independant search system, as there are many free options available. Some of these use coding written and supplied free by search sites such as Google. Regards WCDA admin Nov09
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West Cumbria Dyslexia Association: Contact Doris Pearce 07863 329747 For technical queries about the website email to:
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