Site Help: Search feature?, 0 by kennedyh

kennedyh wrote:
I have been giving a lot of thought as to how to improve the search of the BugFiles. It needs a search that goes straight to groups easily recognised by the user.
That means providing common names for the major groups
My suggestion is that we scrap the list of genera on the BugFiles homepage. This is getting rather long and unwieldy now with 1947 entries so far.
In its place provide a list of Orders, but include a common name for each Order eg.
Hymenoptera Bees, Wasps and Ants

I would suggest that this list be displayed with each order having an image of one representative of the order alongside it.
Selecting the order would then expand out into a list of families (present in the database) within the order and here again where possible a common name for the family should be attached as well and again an image of one species from each family.

Ken
Selecting a family would expand into a list of genera within the family (here common names are hard to come by and might be omitted), but again a sample image from a species in the genus should be displayed.
Then a genus can be selected and all species within the genus should be displayed, with one image of each species for which images are available. There should be an option here of displaying only species that have images.

To work this system we would need to maintain a list of approved orders and approved families within each order and adminstrators would have to approve the addition of any new Order or Family.
I would undertake to provide lists of the Orders and their Families that are already in the database and add common names to each as far as I am able. I would also select representative images for display to illustrate each order and subsequently each family.

At the genus level I think a selection of the first available image in the genus would suffice.

I attach an image of a table showing the Orders currently in the Database with suggested Common Names for each.

There might be good reason to split a few Orders. eg The Butterflies could be separated from the Moths, with specific Lepidopteran families designated as Butterflies and all the rest counted as Moths. Similarly, the Hymenoptera might be separated into three groups, Bees, Wasps and Ants, again with specific families tied to each.