Can anyone tell me what is causing this to happen?

[cameron]

When I do a search for "drivers" on my page, the two products show up but for whatever reason one of them appears at the top of the page.

Secondly, it appears that the two text links appear at the bottom of the page. I would prefer to have the graphics and the product name link.

Heres what Im talking about.... http://www.pongman.com/index.html

Any help would be appreciated
Erik

[cameron]

nuthin' ... nobody is out there on the shopsite forum on a friday night?

[dortchjm]

This drove me nuts, too, until I figured out how to fix it. It's been some time since I got it to this stage, but this is what I remember.

1 - Create a custom Search Template, I used one of ShopSites and modified it. Within it is a SEARCHPRODUCT LOOP which is defined under the product templates. I called mine Search-Override. I customized this to only contain a small graphic, price, and name of the product. It's kind of like the DEFINE PRODUCT in the product template for items to show up in the PRODUCT Loop on pages.

2 - Set the Search Override Template - Preferences > Search Settings > Search Layout

Here's my website, just type a number in the search such as "1010" to see it work.

http://www.hickoryridgedesigns.com

Janice

[cameron]

Janice, this helped and I was able to fool around with it enough to make it do somewhat what I want it to.

Have you seen this site here - http://www.ewatches.com/Pulsar/index.html

I linked directly to a page that categorizes their items EXACTLY how I want to categorize mine. I want to have someone click on a category and only see the pertinant products.

Thanks for getting back to me, your advice helped.

Erik

[dortchjm]

I do something similar on my product pages using a dummy product to link it.

1 - Create a Main Page (accessories.html) and Sub Page (bandanas.html) then have this page link to the main page using a dummy product such as Link-Accessories-Bandanas.

2 - Create a dummy Product for each link. The only information on the product I fill in is the SKU (LNK-001), Name (Link-Accessories-Bandanas), Product Description (Bandanas), Product Images, MoreInfo Page Link (bandanas.html), Add to Pages (Accessories).

3 - Any banana products will be added to the Bandana page.

Hope this makes sense.

Janice
http://www.hickoryridgedesigns.com

[Jim]

You have table alignment problems. The second product is being displayed outside of a table row/cell and the browser doesn't know what to do with it so it sticks it at the top of the page.

Make sure that your template includes proper opening and closing table, tr and td tags for each product. This can most easily be done in the product template but you could do it in the search template by putting them in the Loop for the search results.

You might want to run the generated html through an html checker to help you pinpoint the problems. I use
http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ and use the "enter your HTML directly" to paste the content of the page I want to validate into their validator.

[cameron]

Im so new to this whole ShopSite thing that no, that didnt make much sense.

Im taking baby steps right now as I learn and trying to get every little detail figured out before I move onto the next issue.

Question for you... If you go to my page and search for "irons" you will notice that three producs come up and then at the bottom of that page is 3 text links. Do you know how I get rid of those text links? When I do get rid of them, it seems that I remove the whole product for indexing.

Here is the link to search again .. http://www.pongman.com/index.html

I really appreciate it
Erik

[cameron]

You have table alignment problems. The second product is being displayed outside of a table row/cell and the browser doesn't know what to do with it so it sticks it at the top of the page.

Make sure that your template includes proper opening and closing table, tr and td tags for each product. This can most easily be done in the product template but you could do it in the search template by putting them in the Loop for the search results.

You might want to run the generated html through an html checker to help you pinpoint the problems. I use
http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ and use the "enter your HTML directly" to paste the content of the page I want to validate into their validator.

Jim, I will run this through the validator but what I thought was interesting is that this only happens when you search for "drivers". Ify ou do a search for "irons" they all appear to be just fine. I thought that was strange... any insight?

Much thanks
Erik

[Jim]

I don't think "irons" are displaying correctly either. To me it looks like the are all increasingly farther to the right (at least in FireFox) and tucked up really close to each other. This is another sign of nesting or missing html tags.

[cameron]

I don't think "irons" are displaying correctly either. To me it looks like the are all increasingly farther to the right (at least in FireFox) and tucked up really close to each other. This is another sign of nesting or missing html tags.

Back to the old drawing board then... .. thanks!

Just curious Jim, would you suggest I create my own search template from scratch, or edit a search template that exists to include my top and bottom navigations (via includes)

Thanks
Erik

[Jim]

It doesn't really matter which way you choose to go but if you need lots of customization sometimes it is easier to create one from scratch than to modify an existing one.

There is more than one template involved for search though, you have the search page layout one, the one for the product layout and the one for how the link displays.

First I would try using the ones that are shipped by ShopSite for the theme that you are using and make sure the body of the page and product layout are correct. Once you have that working then it wouldn't be hard to add your header and footer.

[cameron]

There is more than one template involved for search though, you have the search page layout one, the one for the product layout and the one for how the link displays.

Are you saying that I will need to create more than one template or that I currently have more than one template (and that is part of my existing problem)?

Erik

[Jim]

There are (or at least can be ) 3 templates involved in displaying the search results. If you go to Preferences > Search Settings > Search layout you will see the 3 different selection boxes with an option to override the default templates. Normally you will want to override the other templates since they may not display things as you need them.

[cameron]

Jim, youre quick man... I had just sent you a PM too

I see where you are talking about the overiding templates and I havent touched those yet. Are the "Link Template Override" and the "Product Template Override" just snippets of ShopSite code as opposed to full-blown html page?

Is there a place where i can download some examples of these override codes?

Much thanks
Erik

[Jim]

The custom templates can be viewed/edited by going to Merchandising > Custom Templates > The search product template will be in the regular product template area since you could use the normal product template on the search page. The search page template will be found under the Advanced section. The search link template would be found under the Pages section.

The link template is normally part of a page template but for the search all it defines is how the links to pages look so you only need the define links_to_page section. The product template can also be abbreviated since there is no need to have the moreinfo page defined for search results pages.
The search page template is like a normal page template except it uses a Loop search section instead of loop products. Also since product and other pages are not assigned to the search page like the could be on other pages it is not possible to have automatically generated navigation type links. You can however hardcode links to other pages in the html so you can navigate to other pages in your store.