[Sigia-l] Redirects...

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org 
> [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of Sarah Brodwall
> Sent: 02 November 2004 16:50
> To: SIGIA-L
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Redirects...
> 
> On Tue, 2 Nov 2004 11:11:53 -0500, Dan Saffer 
> <dan at odannyboy.com> wrote:
> > Wouldn't the best experience be to make the redirect as seamless as 
> > possible (unnoticeable)? It's fairly easy to do, and 
> doesn't need to 
> > be maintained, only set up. Prevents putting the onus on users to 
> > change their links or bookmarks. Most users, I would imagine, don't 
> > care about the address, only in accessing the content on the page.
> > 
> > Dan
> 
> You can do this on the server side so it's completely 
> seamless--unnoticeable to the user, properly indexed by 
> robots.  It's great for when you have to reorganize a site, 
> so that you don't end up breaking people's bookmarks; I wish 
> more sites would use redirects properly.  There are different 
> HTTP codes based on whether the redirect should be permanent 
> or temporary, etc.  I expect this is something that's 
> generally handled by sysadmins, not directly by IA's?
> 

If you're redesigning a site and wish to preserve the old URLs for
people coming in from bookmarks, search engines, 3rd party links, etc.,
a tool I've found really useful is HTTrack (http://www.httrack.com/). It
will give you a snapshot of the current site's layout which you can then
use to make a list of redirect rules to give to a sysadmin when the new
site goes up. Stuff like:

Old Site				New Site

/companyinfo/contact_us/*	/contat_us/*
/boringstuff/*			/otherinfo/boringstuff/*

Etc.

HTTrack probably won't work on Broadvision sites or other systems that
give wacky URLs though.

Jonathan



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