Support

Current behavior:
Currently webpages are displayed using dynamic URLs like this:
http://<domain>/Default.aspx?pageId=12345

Desired behavior:
Ability to specify custom human-readable URLs for a page, e.g.
http://<domain>/About_us
This can be remembered by people, can help with SEO and can be useful when transferring from another hosting to WA platform.

Questions:
1) Should these URLs have no extension or use HTML or HTM?

E.g. about_us or about_us.html
 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I know Wild Apricot already has this request from me - but am hoping that by posting, some of the rest of you might see applications of benefit to you and might "vote" for this as a desired enhancement when Wild Apricot publishes its "top 50", to get it bumped up in priority.

For those what are not familiar, "friendly url" means that you get to give the page a user-friendly name rather than accepting the random name generated by the computer. 

"Non-friendly" url, as you might see it now - http://xxx.memberlodge.org/Default.aspx?pageId=14193

"Friendly" urls, http://xxx.memberlodge.org/newsletter,  http://xxx.memberlodge.org/contact, http://xxx.memberlodge.org/photos, http://xxx.memberlodge.org/calendar, http://xxx.memberlodge.org/aboutus, etc.

Benefit to your website users - if you know what you want to see, you just type the url in and go right to the page you want.  It is fast and easy to get to where you want to go.

Benefit to website admin that use the html feature for creating new pages -
o you can insert links to pages that you haven't created yet, instead of having to back track and add them after you create the next page
o you can quickly and easily insert any links

Benefit when transitioning from an existing site to a WildApricot site - you can just copy/paste the existing HTML with friendly url's into WildApricot and don't have to go through and fix them all - they will just start working when the url is repointed.

Key benefit when transitioning - all of the external links that exist to the old site will keep working and take people to the new site.

Thanks for the details. When we publish the top requests I will link this up to that feature.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We would like to have this feature!

No extension looks better and simple :-) 

This is an excellent feature request. We would really like to see this implemented especially since we moved a former website to Wild Apricot and now have many broken links throughout the internet. Also, it would be much easier for us to reference specific pages from print literature, etc.

Hey!  I finally found the wish list again!!  and the top 50!!

As you know, I NEED this enhancement to join the party.  I'm dying to get it so I can send you a year's subscription fee.  As was stated above, our current site is completely made with friendly urls and to move I not only have to go through every page looking for links that no longer work, but I lose all my external links that will no longer work - big bummer that we are not willing to do.

As far as the extension, I don't really care as long as it is consistent.  No extension is fine.  I prefer .html to .htm just because more people seem to use it - easier to remember to type.

EDIT - tried to strike thru my comment above, but doesn't seem to be coming out when I save, even though I can see it as I type this.  See my additional comments below.

I'm Begging, Pleading, and Praying for this one!!

 

I vote for this! Not only is it cleaner, but spiders can pick it up so people can find our site!

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Love & Light Kim Stompor

I just re-read my comment above and realize I need to be voting for .html as an extension!!!

(That is what my current urls end in - that is what the external and internal links are all set up as that I'm trying to save!)

Yep - would really like this.

We use the site for events and often send out letters asking people to register for events, and hate having to send them to some really long URL to type in.

 Preference to be able to set these for each page, if required, as we need them. Not to have the system try and guess what it should be.

E.g. www......../events/Event_ID 

Good idea.

Count me as another vote for this feature. Search engine optimization is one reason I could use this. Another is marketing. My organization does online registration for our events and we market them in various ways. It is a 'best practice' to create a landing page specific to the promotion you are doing, so the visitors responding to your marketing don't have to look around on the homepage to figure out where to go to respond. This won't work well with a huge URL -- it needs to be a simple: www.URL.com/KEYWORD.

Not only that, but using a keyword-based 'friendly URL' allows us to track the results of each promotion to see what works and what doesn't -- allowing us to stretch our small marketing budget as far as possible.

This one is a no-brainer-home-run. 

koppl - BTW - if you want to add your vote for this, find the stars at the top of this post. Point to the number of stars you want to give it and then click. You'll see your vote added to the total.

It would make it much easier for our users to bookmark and other know the site layout.

Yes please. Without .html extension if possible.

I see there are people that would like no extension, but I need, Need, NEED .html as an extention in order for all my existing external and internal links to work as we transition over to WA.   As you know, getting friendly url's so we don't lose all of our links, resulting page rank, etc, etc is my barrier to getting up and running on WA.

I'm wondering if you can place a user switch in the system to let each site choose the extension (caveat of once chosen it can't be changed is fine).  No one has opted for .htm so far - so a choice between .html and none would be great.

I teach classes on Internet Marketing.  We're going to use WA to keep track of registrants and members.  So we are definitely interested in getting these types of SEO-friendly urls.

Of course, all WA users that are currently ranking should want the old urls to be 301 redirected to any newly-written urls.

Please contact me if you'd like to talk about it at all before moving forward.

Corey Creed
Hippo Internet Marketing

 

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Interested in learning how to market your website? SEO, Google AdWords, Blogging classes all available at www.HippoIMT.com Now a Wild Apricot site!

I'm confused by your 301 redirect comment - I'm not seeing the need in the transition from one service provider to another?

On our existing service provider, we have a domain name that will be transferred to WA once friendly urls are available and we have set up our WA site to mirror the exisiting site.  So the very same url that is today working on the current provider should bring up the page on WA once we transfer our domain name here - assuming we can give them all the same friendly url names they have on the current system - correct?

You'd only need the redirect if you are not using a top level domain - or if you are changing your domain name - or changing the friendly url . . . and don't you have to continue to have access to the old system to do this? or can you do it via your registrar.

Definitely a desireable feature with the .html extension.  A page without the extension looks non-standard and confusing.  It looks like a subdirectory name to me with an implied index.html as the actual page name in that subdirectory that is displaying.

I would extend this page naming to member directory profile pages if possible so that Joe Smith's directory listing page would be joe-smith.html.  This makes it a lot easier to link to a person's contact page from elsewhere in the website like if I want to say "Contact Joe Smith for details." and I want "Joe Smith" to be a hyperlink to his directory profile.

Now I'm confused. I've never seen anyone say, "Come see us at www.greatsite.com/offers.html" but many who would say "Come see us at www.greatsite.com/offers". I may appreciate the advantage of ".html" suffix, but is it possible to have best of both worlds, i.e. "/offers" gets redirected to "/offers.html"? There's no way I want to say to customers "/members.html"; would rather say "/members". 

allanleonard:

Now I'm confused. I've never seen anyone say, "Come see us at www.greatsite.com/offers.html" but many who would say "Come see us at www.greatsite.com/offers". I may appreciate the advantage of ".html" suffix, but is it possible to have best of both worlds, i.e. "/offers" gets redirected to "/offers.html"? There's no way I want to say to customers "/members.html"; would rather say "/members". 

Hi Allan.  You're right from a non-technical perspective.  Not using the .html part is easier and better.  But, technically, when someone types www.greatsite.com/offers into their browser what they really get is www.greatsite.com/offers/index.html or whatever the website's default page name is (other possible default names are index.htm, default.html, default.htm or index.asp.)  Without the .html or .htm extension, the browser assumes that it's a subdirectory and looks for the default page.  If the default page doesn't exist they get either a 404 File Not Found error or, worse, they get an index-style listing of all the files in the subdirectory which they can then download, view, whatever at will.

So, in order to do what you'd like, you would need to have a bunch of pages named index.html which are located in their respective subdirectories (/offers, /members, etc.)  It's certainly possible, but you risk ending up with a very deep hierarchy structure which can be sloppy and cumbersome: 

greatsite.com/offers/june/tv/index.html
greatsite.com/offers/june/radio/index.html
greatsite.com/offers/june/radio/satellite/index.html
greatsite.com/offers/june/radio/local/index.html
greatsite.com/offers/june/newspaper/index.html
greatsite.com/offers/web/index.html
greatsite.com/offers/membersonly/index.html
...etc...

Each directory level contains only one file (index.html).  Maybe WA has a way of working around this, but this is the normal behavior on Internet websites.

You have my vote for this.   Human-friendly URLs would make everything during transition so much easier.

Agreed. Would be a great feature.

Regarding the 301 comment, this is something that everyone should be aware of.

If you currently have a website and will be moving it to another platform (such as WA), it is important to make a list of all of your old urls for every existing page.  For each of them, you should do one of two things...

 1.  Make sure that the new site has the exact same url.  It should work and be the same basic information on it.

 2.  Determine the new corresponding page and 301 redirect the old url to the new corresponding url.

 In other words, if my old page is www.Site.com/aboutus.com and the new page is www.Site.com/pageid=12, the new site should create a 301 redirect to it.

There are two reasons why...

1.  If someone has your old page as a favorite (or links to it from their site) and they select it, the 301 will automatically redirect them to the correct new page.

2.  (More importantly) If Google knows of links to your old page, it will apply the value of that link to the new page.

This is pretty important.

Of course, if all your old pages have corresponding new pages that are the exact same URL, there is no need to worry about it.  (That's unlikely.)

 

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Interested in learning how to market your website? SEO, Google AdWords, Blogging classes all available at www.HippoIMT.com Now a Wild Apricot site!

We are extremely interested in this feature.

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Interested in learning how to market your website? SEO, Google AdWords, Blogging classes all available at www.HippoIMT.com Now a Wild Apricot site!