SUBMIT 2.0

URL’s - Why should we care?

As web applications get more sophisticated, programmers begin to demand finer control over all aspects of their creation. This trend has now extended to the ubiquitous Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that is used in the address bar of every browser.

We are all familiar with complex URL’s filled with question marks, strange symbols, and numbers. How many times have you needed to write down a URL simply so that you can reproduce it carefully at a later date? For example, if the URL is in an image file, you’ll have to type it into the browser by hand. And God help you if it’s dozens of characters long!

But apart from this, URL’s that are complex are bad for business because Internet users aren’t able to easily remember the page that they visited once and forgot to bookmark. Humans don’t remember meaningless symbols and it is in the interests of web designers to ensure that their URL’s make sense - to get an example, just look at any Wikipedia article.

Other uses of clean URL’s are to improve the search engine friendliness of the site so that you can insert important keywords into it, as well giving the Internet user the flexibility of directly going to a URL because it makes sense - also called “hackability”

IIS 7 and the URL Rewrite Module.

In a lot of cases, it’s easy to keep good URL’s with proper site development. But what if your site already has messy URL’s and rewriting or restructuring the application is not feasible?

IIS 7’s new features allows web developers to convert existing messy URL’s into simpler ones. This is made even easier with the .NET framework. They allow tremendous flexibility in the ability to rewrite URL’s to cover a variety of situations.

For example, suppose you have recently redesigned the folder structure of your website you will be stuck with a lot of broken links. To make matters worse, lots of customers could have bookmarked the pages that have moved leading to a potential loss of business. IIS 7 now allows you to detect such requests and perform a seamless redirection to the new pages. It allows you to create matching rules based on regular expressions or wild cards that give you unparalleled flexibility in changing URL’s to suit your needs.

One of the coolest possibilities is to completely rewrite a URL so that what the customer sees in the address bar makes sense - without that page even existing in the first place! What this means is that suppose the customer is viewing the list of books by a particular author. This author is identified internally in your database with a number and the querystring in the URL reflects that. However, such a URL makes no sense to a user who will not remember the URL if he or she forgets to bookmark it.

With the new features in IIS 7, you can have a URL that reads “…/europe/dickens” instead of “…/display?authorid=89&continentID=2″ . Unknown to the user, the first URL may not actually exist physically on the server! But when they type it into the browser address bar, they get what they expect to see.

These exciting developments have only just emerged along with improvements to the IIS 7 engine. Another reason to choose a Windows Hosting service!

Source: EzineArticles

Filed under: Website Promotion