Web Development Ethiopia

The following provide a set of suggestions for effective presentation of search results.
Use Domain – Specific Terminology

Use terminology, relevant to your domain. Avoid terms like “record,” “field,” or “database.” For instance, instead of saying “55 records found in the database,” specifically say “55 matching products found in the store.”

Repeat the Query
Your presentation should repeat the search query so people don’t have to remember exactly what they searched for as they evaluate the results (e.g., “Searching for: ‘cats and dogs’”). When possible, repeat the search query in another search box. This makes it easier for the user to refine and repeat the query.

Specify the Number of Results
Specify the number of matching results found. Sometimes it’s also useful to specify the total number of documents or database entries (e.g., “36 matches out of 10,000”).

Provide the Title and Description of Each Result
List the title and description of each match. For instance, when listing matching web pages, provide the title, URL, and description:

“The Word’s Best Cat Nip, www.catnipfromheaven.com, ‘organic farm-grown catnip that will make your cat beg for more.’”

Help Users Find Similar Documents
As people refine their ideas about what they’re looking for, one common need is to find similar documents. Each result could contain a link such as “More like this …” Thus, when users find a match they’re happy with, they can easily find similar items without having to construct a good query to do so.

No Results
When too many matches are found, consider providing search tips to help refine the query, such as using more specific search terms. Categorize the results to help users narrow down their queries, as shown in the following example:
Search for: “pets” returns 500 matches (out of 10,000 documents).
Choose a category of interest:
Pet food (220)
Pet supplies (150)
Training and housebreaking pets (50)
Veterinarians (43)
Celebrity pets (37)

Multipage Results
When more results are available than can be listed on a single page, be sure to specify what set of results, within the entire list, is currently being shown (e.g., “items 11 20 of 55”).

Sorting Results Listings
Sort the results from most relevant. If you can’t gauge relevance well, use a logical order, such as alphabetical order.

Embedding Your Site within the Framework of the Rest of the Web
Your site must be effective within the framework of the entire Internet. This means people need to be able to find your site when they’re looking for it and be able to identify both that your site exists and that it contains pertinent content.

Your site will link to other sites and be linked from other sites, and you’ll want these links to be meaningful and reliable. In addition, your site should work well with automated tools, such as search engine spiders.

It’s a good practice to mark up your pages with information that helps automated tools understand your content. Pages can be designed to work effectively with other tools by following HTML standards as closely as possible.

Using style sheets or XML is helpful in separating content from formatting as much as possible. Use the <title> tag to label pages clearly and unambiguously, and use metatags to specify keywords, descriptions, and related information. See the sidebar “The Dublin Core Element Set” for more information on metatags.

Your site may have one or more gateway pages. These are pages intended to be entry points into your site. The home page is an obvious gateway page.

Other gateway pages may include pages that are targeted to specific user populations, interest areas, or pages that are simply expected to be extremely popular because of their valuable content.

Gateway pages may accidentally evolve (because of their popularity), or they may be designed as such, presenting themselves as a main page and often having their own domain name. These pages are convenient pages to advertise, so that specific target audiences can go directly to a view of the site intended for them.

Your site benefits from strong orientation cues, such as an obvious site logo, a large page title, and a distinctive page layout, which help new arrivals at you site by informing them where they are.

Very effective orientation cues also help people understand the relationship between your site and other external sites. For instance, if you are creating a site for a local city government, you might add to it a set of links to related governments, such a US Government Michigan Washtenaw Country Ann Arbor.

For those unfamiliar with your city, the type of breadcrumb trail gives them helpful context, and for those with an acute interest, it gives them easy access to related sites. In addition, if you can convince related sites to adopt the same convention, you can create a community of easy-to-navigate sites.

Similarly, you may want to add links to related external sites in other types of structures, such as linking to a web-ring about your topic area, providing links to general indexes related to your company or topic area, or providing quick links to search engines that automatically search for your topic.

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