Inspired by a tip when I had coffee with John Jantsch the other morning (thanks John!) I added Google Custom Search to the upper right-hand of this blog. I should have had search capabilities a long time ago, but got lazy. Thanks to all of you who goaded me to do it (Pete W. and Robin in particular).
Given my limited coding skills, I can’t figure out how to have the results display on my own blog page like John’s does on Duct Tape Marketing, so for the moment, I am having Google host the search results.
But I am getting some help with blog enhancements next month, so I will straighten it out then.
My first move is in the spirit of "improvement, not perfection!"
Have a great weekend everyone!
Pam,
Create a new TypePad Page and apply your current template – that’s where you results will go – name it something searchish
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/ducttapemarketing_search.html
is my page.
Then Google asks you in your set-up where you want your results to display – you have the default but you should change this to your new URL.
Then they give you two pieces of code – 1) for the search box and 2) one for the results.
You have the search box one going now but take the results one and put that in the body of your new search results TypePad page and you should be set
One more thing – on the search box code you can adjust the length of the search box so it doesn’t fly out of your design by setting this
line in the search box code to like 18 instead of the default 30.
—
John, how you manage to dominate the worldwide market for small business marketing AND find time for individual tech support is beyond me. Thanks for the tips!
🙂
-Pam
Hi Pam:
There is a good tutorial by Maki in DoshDosh that shows you how to put the search results on your own site. He uses Wordpress and you’re using Typepad, but it should be similar. Here’s the link just in case you have time (yeah, right) to tinker around:
http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-set-up-google-custom-search-and-make-money/