Help for implementing on Ecommerce website

[giftstoindia]

Hi

I have just purchased the professional version of zoom search for my ecommerce gifts to india website at http://www.gujaratgifts.com

Before I ask my questions, please bear with me while I explain what I am trying to do:

The website has the following constraints:

a) Made entirely in static HTML with 10000+ pages across almost 100 directories
b) 200 category pages
c) 2000 product pages

the remaining 8000 pages are basically sections of the website I no longer use (say valentines day 2003, Vday 2004 and so on), but I have not deleted from the site because they have Pagerank and pass link juice to my main site. I don't want the users to be able to reach them from the site, and specially search. However, spiders may still be able to get to them because there may be stray links.

I want to implement search only so that my above 2000 product pages are searched. I would ideally like to display the products in a grid-fashion as depicted in the link http://www.gujaratgifts.com/search-results.jpg

Having skimmed through the manual and some forum posts + the kind revert from David last night on a query, following options and issues come to mind:

a) How do I ensure that only these 2000 pages are indexed? Can I put some custom meta tag in these pages? It is not feasible to put the ZOOMSTART / STOP tags on all the other 8000 pages.

one pattern is that all these pages are in folders /pages/ e.g. flowers/pages or cakes/pages

I can try deleting all files from a local copy except these pages (as suggested in one of the threads), but it will keep getting messy for incremental updates. Plus there will be 70-80 folders and subfolders I will have to hunt and delete.

So basically, I am looking at some kind of inclusion criteria by which only these 2000 pages are spidered - I can make the effort of putting in some custom code in these 2000 pages if it can help.

b) I need 4 things in the results - i) Thumbnail ii) Item name iii) Price and iv) a Buy now button

I can define the first 3 as CUSTOM META TAGS in the 2000 product pages (along with CATEGORY - say flowers). David updated me that currently, putting a BUY NOW button with custom code is not easily do-able. However, here i can Cheat a bit and put in a BUY NOW gif, but which just links to the product page.

Is this do-able? So I need the thumbnail, Title and another custom gif per product, all linking back to the product page.

The grid issue, I can tackle using the CSS tweak in the other thread as indicated by David.

I don't have any programming knowledge, so I can't custom code. However, if anyone can share any work-arounds / elegant solutions; I am sure this will be a beautiful implementation from a great product.

Thanks a ton for reading

With Regards,
Amit Khetan
Gifts to India

[David]

Zoom by default includes all pages on your site. So if you don't want all pages indexed you need to exclude the pages you don't want indexed.

This can be done via any one of the following methods
1) A robots.txt file
2) The page and folder skip list in Zoom.
3) Making sure there are no links to the pages you don't want indexed when using spider mode indexing.
4) Using the noindex meta tags


A grid of just thumbs is possible with just CSS. See,
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1029 (about half way down the page).

You will probalby need to write a small amount of custom code to get the grid layout and buy now button.

Add better support for buttons in search results is a function we will be looking at adding in the next major release. But this is some time off.

As you appear to be in India, I would think you can find an experienced web programmer fairly cheap to do this for you. It is maybe 2 hours of work I would guess.

[giftstoindia]

Hi

Thanks for the help. For the selective crawl option, I guess the only feasible solution is to put the selected 2000 product pages in a new directory (with the sub-folder structure intact) and crawl just those. I can't think of any other fool proof way to ensure that only product pages are indexed (excluding 8000 pages is very difficult on a page-by-page or even directory basis).

I guess I will try to figure the CSS out. Currently, my results look this this:

http://www.gujaratgifts.com/searchdata3/search.cgi
(search for the word "cookie")

I am specifying 4 custom fields in each product page. e.g.

<meta name="ZOOMIMAGE" content="../thumb/17.jpg">
<meta name="PRICE" content="11.95">
<meta name="ZOOMCATEGORY" content="Cookies">
<meta name="name" content="Danish Butter Cookies">

How do I achieve price banding in the search form? (e.g. instead of input box, prices is a drop down with four options:

Upto $ 5
$ 5 to $ 15
$ 15 to $ 25
Any

I would ideally like to have a "Sort Price: Low to High" and "Sort Price: High to Low" option in the search results.

I think the software front end, does not directly give option as "BETWEEN 5 and 15" for the PRICE in Custom Meta Data, which can be a useful feature for future releases.

Since price is specified in the product pages, hopefully there should be some way to do the banding as above.

I am sorry if I seem to be asking for too much! I am really enjoying playing around with Zoom Search Engine to try and extend my site's possibilities to the maximum extent possible.

This product is great and worth every penny you charge for it!

Cheers n Regards,
Amit

[Ray]

Thanks for the help. For the selective crawl option, I guess the only feasible solution is to put the selected 2000 product pages in a new directory (with the sub-folder structure intact) and crawl just those. I can't think of any other fool proof way to ensure that only product pages are indexed (excluding 8000 pages is very difficult on a page-by-page or even directory basis).

If you would really rather specify exactly the list of pages to index only, you can do so by specifying each as an individual start point. Click on "More" button next to the "Start spider from this URL" entry. Add each URL here with the spidering option of "Index single page only".

You can use a text file to import this list of URLs in, see chapter 7.3 in the Users Guide for more details.

I am specifying 4 custom fields in each product page. e.g.

<meta name="ZOOMIMAGE" content="../thumb/17.jpg">
<meta name="PRICE" content="11.95">
<meta name="ZOOMCATEGORY" content="Cookies">
<meta name="name" content="Danish Butter Cookies">

How do I achieve price banding in the search form? (e.g. instead of input box, prices is a drop down with four options:

Upto $ 5
$ 5 to $ 15
$ 15 to $ 25
Any

You can create a "Maximum price" search (i.e. allow the user to specify the top band), or a "Minimum" search. But there's no "banding" or "range" searching at this point. It is something we were considering for the next version (V7) if there was enough interest from users.

I would ideally like to have a "Sort Price: Low to High" and "Sort Price: High to Low" option in the search results.

This is also on our list of things to consider for V7 (making results sortable by Custom Meta Fields).

We appreciate the input and hope to hear from more users what they would like to see in V7.

[samuelmaxton]

I very much would like to see these improvements as well!

Hello,

Setting up a search engine for a retail store, they desire a search page that allows the customer to sort results by price and/or search for products within a certain price band. Please add to new version!!!!

Thank you