The Downtempo Blog

I’ve been working on a Ruby on Rails (RoR) project with a colleague as DOWNTEMPO’s first incubated product. While I’m more of a product shepherd than a programmer, I believe in trying my hand at everything, and so I found myself being tutored in the ways of Ruby and RoR.

One of the (many) great things about RoR is that it gets you up and running quickly, but one thing that you need to still do manually is to plan out a set of clearly readable “friendly” URLs for your website structure. (There are volumes of debate on how importnat the second item is, but I’ll leave finding those as an exercise for the reader.)

Search engines use a combination of URL, page title, and page content to index content on a site. Having clear URL structure will significantly impact the ranking of content in search results.

Here are some simple suggestions of how to structure your own site URLs. I thought I’d share them with you and save you paying me my consulting fees just to learn something that everyone should know.

HOMEPAGE

Should always be linked to as ”/” (so the homepage URL would always be “http://www.downtempo.net/” and never “index.htm” or “http://www.downtempo.net/page/2”).

TOP-LEVEL PAGES

Should always be linked to as the section title, using dashes or underscores instead of spaces. Use short, descriptive names that either match or are a derivative of the page title (ie. a page titled “The People of Downtempo” would get a url of “/people/”)

For example, the top-level page URLs on the Downtempo site are:

http://www.downtempo.net/work/
http://www.downtempo.net/process/
http://www.downtempo.net/people/
http://www.dowtempo.net/blog/

SECOND-LEVEL PAGES

Second-level pages (sub-sections) should always be linked to as an abbreviated form of the second-level title, using dashes or underscores instead of spaces.

For example, if i had a news section on the people site, and i had it broken down by subsections called “Featured News”, “News from Partners”, “Press Releases”, and “News of the Weird”, my URL structure should look like this:

http://www.downtempo.net/news/featured/

http://www.downtempo.net/news/partners/

http://www.downtempo.net/news/pr/

http://www.downtempo.net/news/weird/

THIRD-LEVEL PAGES

Third-level pages (ie. specific articles or images) should always be linked to with the full title of the article or image in the url, using underscores (or dashes, depending on your personal preference, it doesn’t make a difference with regards to SEO) instead of spaces, and removing any non-URL-compliant characters (ie. don’t urlencode characters like quotes ” just strip them out).

NOTE: If the user later changes the title of an article or image, this should NOT change the URL. This gets set only once, when the article/image is first created (although you may want to have a special override in later for cases where they REALLY want to change this—a lot of blogging platforms have this feature).

all URLs should always be less than 255 characters to avoid problems with some spiders and web form fields (they might want to use a URL as their IM status, for example).

A few examples of how to apply these guidelines:

1.) A news article article at “http://www.somenewssite.com/news_item/2″ should have this URL instead:
“http://www.somenewssite.com/news/article/bush_announces_unprecedented_step_to_address_financial_crisis”

2.) The press release at “http://www.somecompany.com/releases/2008/10342.html” should have this URL instead:
“http://www.somecompany.com/news/pr/revenue_grows_100_percent_over_last_quarter”

3.) The image at “http://www.somephotosite.com/image_set/2″ should have this URL instead: “http://www.somephotosite.com/photos/sutro_tower_in_the_fog”