moving pages and site structure

[Jeff Thies]

I'm making sites that have the page paths follow their navigation
structure, so a page that falls here in the navigation:

Section 2
Subsection 3
Page 1

would have this url:

/section_2/subsection_3/page_1.html

That seems logical to me.

So the questions is what happens if the site structure gets changed and
Page 1 gets moved to Section 3?

I used to leave the page path the sames but lately I've been changing
the page path to reflect the hierarchy:

/section_3/page_1.html

That seems more logical but presents the problem of bookmarked pages.

Rearranging sites is common, how do you handle this? (this is all CMS of
of my design)

Jeff

 

[Mark Parnell]

So the questions is what happens if the site structure gets changed and
Page 1 gets moved to Section 3?

Make sure the server sends the appropriate HTTP status code when the old
page is requested. In this case I would think 301 - Moved Permanently
would be appropriate.

In an ideal world, the browser would automatically update its bookmarks
when it received a 301 to reflect the change, but no browser actually
does that AFAIK.

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

I used to leave the page path the sames but lately I've been changing
the page path to reflect the hierarchy:

/section_3/page_1.html

That seems more logical but presents the problem of bookmarked pages.

Use a server-side redirect from the old location to the new one.
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/97/13/index4a.html?tw=backend