Customizing Magento's search box

You can also customize Magento's search feature through the Magento templates. The search feature is especially important for stores with a large number of products, so ensuring that it is in a prominent place and looks like a search feature is very important.

Firstly, to overwrite the template used for the search form in the header, copy the search.mini.phtml file at /app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalogsearch/ into the /app/design/frontend/default/m18/template/catalogsearch directory, and find the following lines that constitute the Search button:

<button type="submit" title="<?php echo $this->__('Search') ?>" class="button">
<span><span>
<?php echo $this->__('Search') ?>
</span></span>
</button>

Remove the <span> elements highlighted in the preceding code, as these are no longer required in the new theme. Open your theme's styles.css file to provide some basic styling for the search...