Question

I want to use an idea that I have seen on another website where I enter a “keyword”, press Enter, and it then takes the client to a specific page or website.

I have seen something like this on http://qldgov.remserv.com.au, On the right side there is a field called “My Employer”, type in “health” for example and you will be provided with relevant content.

Essentially I have client branded mini sites where we want to assign a “keyword” for each client brand so all of their employees will be able to go to their site entering this one keyword without all of them having individual logins. I want to be able to link to a URL that I can define in some manner.

I have looked at the source code of the site mentioned above and see they are using a form but I am not sure how they have assigned the keywords or if its even possible to do this without a database or anything like that. Trying to keep it as simple as possible as I am not a PHP/Java expert by any means.

Any help would be appreciated, even if its not code but an idea of the direction I need to go in to make this work. Thanks in advance!! 🙂

Answer 1

The easiest way in my eyes would be to define an array that contains all of the keywords and respective urls client side (in JS). For example:

​var array = { 'health' : '/health.php', 'sport' : '/swimming.php' };

You would then get the user input on onSubmit and if it exists modify the window.location appropriately.

if ( array[user_input] !== undefined ) {
     window.location = array[user_input];
}
else {
     alert ( 'not found' );
}

If the user supplied health they will be redirected to /health.php, if they supply sport they will be redirected to /swimming.php (JSFiddle). Alternatively you can use server-side (PHP, JAVA) to handle the request but this may not be worth the effort.

Goodluck.