NATHAN ASHBY-KUHLMAN > Blog Entry

How not to change your URL

The Palm Beach Post’s Web edition recently moved from portal site gopbi.com onto its own domain, PalmBeachPost.com.

Gopbi.com/partners/pbpost/ now correctly redirects, but gopbi.com/pbpost/ — where the newspaper’s home page also was previously available — does not. Rather than a redirect, gopbi.com/pbpost/ gives you a “page not found” error. Bad idea, when there are some sites (not very many, but a few) that link to the now-broken URL. The Post ought to have a redirect on all its old URLs.

The site’s new URL scheme has some odd behavior too. Palmbeachpost.com/sports/ displays another error message. Palmbeachpost.com/sports/content/ displays the home page’s content under a “sports” header. Only palmbeachpost.com/sports/content/sports/ actually gives the sports page. Such URLs are a poor choice, being neither short nor hackable nor tease-from-print-able.

Comment by Chris Heisel, posted April 13, 2003, 11:37 am

Nor cool...

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This page last modified on Sunday, January 15, 2006 at 7:59 pm