Print friendly URLs
Creating links that are easier for users to access when copying from printed material.
Introduction
Sometimes a page's natural URL (e.g. www.wholething.co.uk/index.asp?Pageid=100) is too unwieldy. If someone needed to read this url from printed material to access it, wouldn't they rather have www.wholething.co.uk/news?
This is known as a print-friendly URL.
There are two reasons to create them:
- So that printed material can contain user-friendly links to pages in your site.
- If you frequently need to verbally direct users to a page in your site.
Best practice dictates that you do not have too many of them.
Therefore, if your organisation is running a competition to win a trip to Hawaii, www.wholething.co.uk/competition is better than www.wholething.co.uk/Hawaii. Why? Because it can be easily re-cycled next year when the prize is a camera.
Similarly, instead of creating series of print-friendly URLs to individual press releases in your news section, it is better to create www.wholething.co.uk/news which points to the news section home page.
In practice
To let us know which print-friendlyURLs you require, simply provide us with a link to the target page and the URL you would like to associate (e.g. www.wholething.co.uk/index.asp?Pageid=100 - www.wholething.co.uk/news).
We will then set these up on the server in a way that any search engine which encounters the link does not penalise your site for duplicate content.
There is a 20 minute minimum charge for this work, so it is better value to approach us with several to do at one go.