Webmaster Tips

Leave A Trail...

Site redesign and the Redirect tag

I've noticed that a number of our hosted sites are changing page names and paths a lot. This can be a problem for visitors who have bookmarked various pages on your site or for those who follow links on search engines which haven't been updated yet.

There are a couple of things you can do to remedy this situation.

The first is to plan out your site well in the first place. Sometimes that's easier said than done. But if you think of the major areas that you're involved in, you can probably come up with a workable "filing system" for your site, and then stick with it.

For instance, let's say you're doing a site for your club or volunteer organization. You have your welcome page (index.html), information on your activities, your staff or board of directors, archives of newsletters, a calendar of events, etc etc. Your basic site structure might look like this;

index.html

Notice that at the root level of this site there's only one html file - your main page. Everything else is filed in separate folders. This makes it easier to keep track of where everything is. Even those sections that only have a single page, like events and workshops, have that page in a separate folder. This allows the webmaster of this site to later add more pages under /events/, without having to redesign site's basic structure.

Let's say that you originally just had a page at the root level called events.html, and now you have found that the Board want to go into greater detail about each of their events - essentially creating a separate page for each. One of the better ways to handle this would be to create an events folder, as above, and put all those separate pages in it. For your own ease of record keeping, you decide to move the old events.html page into the events folder, and have it be the index.html file for that folder.

So far, no problem. Then along comes Joe Websurfer. He bookmarked events.html two months ago, and wants to see what's up this week. Or he followed a link from another site. He opens up his bookmark/link and whammo!, he gets the error page. If he's smart and/or determined, he'll try something like taking the "events.html" part off the web address, to see if he can find what he's after. (unfortunately, not all websurfers are smart. And search engines are most decidedly not smart.)

Well, you could leave things like that, or you could keep two copies of that page up there (which will most likely result in you forgetting to update one or the other eventually), or you could leave a simple REDIRECT file at the old page, which will automatically put the websurfer at the correct page.

There are several ways of doing that. Originally, we had to leave a page behind that said something like "This page has moved to www.newlocation.com. Please update your bookmarks". Some people even figured out how to use the Meta Refresh tag to automatically redirect the browser after a set number of seconds. My preference is to use the NetCloak redirect tag.

The old events.html file would be replaced with a single line:

Hit that events.html page now, and in a nanosecond or two you'll be at the new page. The URL you redirect to can either be relative to the page you're redirecting from (as above) or you can use the absolute URL (in this case, http://www.mysite.com/events/index.html).

This way, you keep your web surfers happy, and nobody ends up getting that dreaded error file. Eventually, everyone will bookmark/link to the new file and you will be able to take that old file away. You can watch the stats page and see if it's still getting hits.

Try it! Create a page called test.html. Put some text or images on it. Then create a second page called redirect.html, with the line <redirect "test.html">. Put them in the same folder on your site. Now surf to redirect.html and see what happens.

We'll play around with redirects more when we get to the HIDE and SHOW tags

If you're not hosted by Sustainable Sources (or another webserver that uses NetCloak), you can usually accomplish the same thing with the Meta Refresh tag with seconds=0. The problem with the meta refresh tag is that it depends upon the browser's ability to understand the command. With the NetCloak redirect above, the redirection command occurs at the server level, not the browser level.

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