Setting up Web Site Redirects
Today’s Byte is a quick Web Development 101 lesson. (If you aren’t into html, shoot to the penultimate paragraph for a tip for everyone.) Someone asked me to set up a redirect for them last week. I realized that I had never done that so I had to look it up. I thought I’d pass on what I learned.
A “web redirect” will automatically send a user from one web page to another. It’s handy if you move one page of your site or when the “real” address of a page is too long or you want to create a more memorable
address. For example you can turn this:
http://www.bizpathways.org/BizPathways/BizPathways.
aspx?path=2845c1fc-dd5e-4ec6-997a-7480b1082577,dca3cd25
-e5be-4347-b11c-6e687e627965,095fc0c3-09bb-4ed6-9ecd-
cd2408f9101c
into this: http://www.treacyinfo.com/biz.htm. (This
makes life easier if you think you’re going to have to read this address on the phone or email it to folks.)
To set up a redirect, paste the following into the code of your web page and save it as the address you want to use. In the example above you would save this as the more readable address and replace “http://www.domainname.com” with the address of the page you are targeting (the long address in the case above).
<html>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” content= “0;URL=http://www.domainname.com”>
</html>
On a related note – if you ever run into a long address that you want to send to a friend you can shorten it by using shorl.com. http://www.shorl.com Simply paste the long address into the tool on
shorl page and they’ll give you a shorter version to copy and paste to your friend. So (http://shorl.com/fahepubraliju) is another short cut to the long address above.
