Key point

The addresses of pages on your website shouldn't be gobble-de-gook and you shouldn't give any hint of the technologies used.

Explanation

The URL is the address that appears at the top of your web browser. For example the address of this page is:

On other websites you may have noticed that they would have an address something like:

Apart from the fact that the second example is illegible there is another, more important, issue. The second example features the suffix '.aspx' which means that we can tell that this page is being run by a page that is using Microsoft's latest server technology.

Problems start to arise when other websites (like Google, a supplier, a friend or even within your own website) link to your page and you want to make changes to your website or the technologies that run it. Up until a few years ago Microsoft's server technology was represented by the '.asp' suffix and when they came out with the latest version that required the '.aspx' suffix millions of links to pages broke.

This website uses a utility called mod_rewrite that takes a simple URL and maps it behind the scenes to whatever technology happens to be providing the web page — in this case PHP but we could just as easily move to another technology and the website wouldn't skip a beat.

What you can do

If your website has ugly URLs, make contact with us today to see what can be done to make your site a clever site.