Mister id=500&category=32 ain't no friend of mine!

Always working with clients to ensure their sites are nice and easy for both visitors AND search engines to browse, and lately we've focussed especially on 'friendly URLs' (Uniform Resource Locators - the available information's 'address' or location).

As much as the geeks among us love to see a few IDs, category codes and the like in their website URLs, nothing beats the simplicity of a human readable series of URLs, which relate directly to the content they are displaying. Take the following example:

example.com/index.php?id=500&category=32

Pretty*, but leaves something to be desired! A much better example would be...

example.com/benefits-of-friendly-urls/example-of-a-good-url

This has a number of benefits:

• It's obviously much easier to see what the URL relates to
• It's possible to change pages by editing the URL (eg. going up one level to the 'parent' page by deleting the last part of the URL)
• Search engines will associate the URL with its content, as well as links from other pages to this URL, and it will increase the number and quality of keywords linking various material in the website

I need a CMS - how will it know what URLs to use?

At BIG any CMS we develop will by default generate friendly URLs to all its pages, which saves you a headache. It does this by converting the content in question (usually a page title, or section heading) into a valid bit of text for use in URLs; apostrophes and other 'unfriendly' characters will be automatically taken out, leaving you with a safe, human-readable, and search engine optimised URL for use throughout your website. What could be simpler?!

What about Mister id=500&category=32... where will he end up?

Don't worry, he'll still be around, just lurking in the background doing his job talking to the database, leaving Mr Friendly URL to do all the client facing.  Hmmm... sounds distinctly familiar **.

* Just kidding, I may be a developer... but I'm not that sad!
** You guessed it, I'm a developer... so I may well be that sad!