Alternatives ways to open up an extended visual search block

Question

I am building UX/UI for admin panel for narrowly focused web app. It is small business app. Let's say you have more than 100 web sites for different clients. By this app you can manage/edit each of them. On first screen there will be search bar to find concrete web site you wanna work with (by website name, by author name, by a year, id and so on....).

Seeking good suggestions of how to open up extended "visual" search block if person doesn't want to use simple usual search box. In extended block you will have opportunity to scroll between photos of author if you search by author or image/small preview of a web site.

What are the best solutions to open up this extra block being in the same screen, just bellow usual search box and with fast option to minimise/close an extended window again? Please, help me to find a good variant to show it for the user. Thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

Try something like this:

You can use the 'More' link to navigate the user to see complete view of the section, but if you think your user will click on the section itself to do the same thing, you can ignore it.

Answer 2

To make the "extended "visual" search block" in simple term "Advanced Search" if i understand correctly, it would be best to show it in a pop-up as more visual elements are coming as a search results. If you try to open up the existing layout, it might disturb the existing layout and even if we try to accommodate in the existing layout as to open up like a accordion you would have trouble finding the proper user friendly place to put the option to revert back to simple search and might lead to confusion between the simple and advanced search in the process.

My suggestion is to put a tooltip to the textbox with the link "Advanced Search" and open up the search in the popup with more visual elements. If the user wants simple search he'll just type in the search-box else he'll click on the tooltip link to open a Advanced search.