Re-writing Your URL’s
So my task for the day is to put together all of the re-writes necessary for the new launch of barbourbooks.com (please, don’t look now — your eyes may hurt — think bumble bee). The guys at Clear Function have done a great job of giving us a new look. One of the main tasks I have looked at is making sure that all previous URL’s will be accessible with the new site. This is just a string of several other sites I have re-built and have had to use re-writes for accessibility. By accessibility, I mean that I want all previous links to point to the new page on the new site, especially in the case of URL’s that marketing already has out on books or the URL’s that some may have bookmarked (anything to prevent an error page — I have thought about using mod_speling but am waiting to test the performance implications). This was the first task — to match all previous URL’s and map them accordingly. Regular expressions make this somewhat easier.
Next is the task of mapping out the current site structure and creating the new shell for the site. All URL’s will be rewritten for ease of use, search, and bookmarking (as well as some internal tracking). This has taken some serious thought and time to make sure we have the appropriate re-writes, and not duplicating things in certain pages or files. So, the progress continues and it’s my task for the day! This is just the beginning of mapping URL’s for our new website (not all URL’s will be database driven, most will be pulled from the file server and actions processed accordingly). I have found this helps immensely with separating style, content, programming, and even the database layer to a degree. It will also help with security and SEO.
How (if at all) do you use re-writes? Anyone have any good tricks/tips?