The first step is to recognize that the URIs you have now should be considered permanent. Yes, if you have pages up now, and they are not well organized, take a deep breath, recognize this situation, and MOVE ON.
Once you've decided to reorganize your site, use the tools available with your server to relocate URIs when the pages move. If you don't have access to server level redirects, you can use meta refresh tags or even JavaScript.
Organize Intelligently
- Date your articles
All the articles on this site are based upon the date they are published. This article was published on September 21, 2001, and you can tell from the URI: http://webdesign.about.com/library/weekly/aa092101a.htm.
- Don't date static pages
If your company puts on a yearly conference, and doesn't save the old conference information, why are you saving the URI? You can use a generic form of the URI to define the conference and use it every year.
- Leave out information
Author's name, topic, other information about the article - all of these things may change as the page evolves. If you leave them out of the URL then you won't have to update the URL when those details change.
- Consider your software
Are you going to be using ASP, ColdFusion, or even CGI in two years? in ten? A great Web site hides both what back-end server information it is using, and also makes the server stuff transparent to the customer. So that if next week a site were to switch to JSP, the customers could still use the same URLs to get to the articles or information.
Don't be a contributor to link rot. Make your site pages stick around, and if you must move them, leave redirects up so that your customers can still find what they're looking for.
