 static. That is to say, they stay put. Possibly for the entire lifecycle of the website. They can contain dynamic elements, and can be edited and changed as needed, but the nature of a page is that it sticks around. This is illustrated by the fact that pages are likely to make up most of the links in your navigation bar.
This is all seems like it’s working until we introduce some complexity. In our example, you see a clear structure where team is in about, and sally-b is in team. But say the team grows, and within team there is now a department. Sure, you could start adding department folders under the team folder and move people into departments, but there’s always that one position in the organization that messes is up. What if they don’t have a department? What if they work in two departments? We might need to have a URL structure that addresses this.
The biggest difference between posts and pages are that pages are organized by hierarchy, and posts are organized by date. On an active blog or news site, posts will be constantly changing. Typically they’re ordered by date in a descending order so you see the newest post first. Another way that posts are organized is by category and tag. This means that a given blog post might be found in a number of different places on the site. It might be a part of the main blog index, as well as one or more categories or tags, and finally, since they’re organized by date, you may find the same post in a date archive. In WordPress, a date archive URL contains the year and month like this: https://mywebsite.com/2017/08/.
Events have some similarities with posts in that they’re organized by date, and can be organized within categories. However, posts are ordered by the date published, and events will most likely be organized by the date in which the event occurs. While the published and modified dates are built in to WordPress, event dates are not and that functionality is added as a plugin or custom post meta field that is unique to the Event post type. Because it’s a custom post type with additional custom fields, the URL can be customized to the site requirements.
A product can be very complex depending on the type and number of products. A product can have one or more categories, and sub categories. A product can also have variations like size and color. A product also has some unique attributes like a description, image, title and price, and maybe some weight and dimensions. These can all have a significant impact on the URL structure. Say you’ve picked out a t-shirt that you want for your birthday. You want the yellow one in XL and you’d like to send that link to your friend so they know what to get you. You’ve got to have a URL structure that supports that, and by the way, the most popular e-commerce package for WordPress, WooCommerce, does not have that capability out of the box.
Once you’re site is set up and going, you’re probably not putting much thought into the URL structure. When you create the page, “Company Timeline” as a child of the “About” page, that’s how it will show up in your url, and that’s good enough. Here are some key points where you’ll want to pay attention to the url structure, so you don’t get stuck, or find yourself having to change the URL structure after you have something established.
If you’re changing your structure you’ll need to consider creating redirects so people can find the content in its new location. There are a couple of ways to handle that in WordPress, but the simplest is with plugins. Here are three that I recommend.
This redirects to only white-listed domains, is very simple, and is written by the brilliant developers at 10up.
It’s been around forever and is rock solid.
There’s a decent chance you have the Yoast SEO plugin on your site anyway. The Premium version handles redirects, and even automatically prompts you to add redirects when you move elements around on your site.
Related to your URL structure is your site map, specifically the sitemap.xml. Search engines use this to attempt to understand not only where pages are on your site, but what they mean, and how important they are. The article focused on how URLs organize our content for the sake of our human audience, but we have a robot audience that pay attention to this structure as well, and the sitemap.xml file is one way to inform the search engine crawlers about your site.
The Yoast SEO plugin can automate the creation of that file, and update it when new elements are added. You can verify that it’s working by looking at the Google Search Console in Webmaster tools.
WordPress automatically stripped out the stop words, added dashes, and lowercased my title to make a nice clean url readable by humans and robots.
This article has focused on structure, but the content of your URL is important to, both for readability by humans, and search engines alike. Thankfully, WordPress is really smart about helping take the title of your element, stripping out stop words like a, and, the, and by and replacing spaces with dashes. Your title automatically becomes a readable URL without a lot of fuss.
Have you ever be caught assuming that your URL would be a certain way? Have you ever launched a beautiful new site, only to find traffic instantly drop off? Share your experience in the comments below. I’d love to hear about it.The Faroe Islands Podcast
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Podcast 70 Revisited: Halloween Horrors!
Halloween is upon us, so we thought we'd take another listen to our of our most popular shows. This episode (first released in 2010) features some spooky recordings made in the tunnels north of Klaksvik. It is said these tunnels are haunted. Are they really? Listen to the show and make up your own mind.
As always you can listen on iTunes, on our media player above, or download the show directly here:
And if you want to listen to the unedited audio we recorded in the tunnel, you can find it here:
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Joe Diblin with a model of the bomber he loved so much — the B-24 Liberator.
Joe Diblin speaks with a group of students from Central Columbia during a World War II luncheon near Bloomsburg.
At his 100th birthday party celebration in 2017, Joe Diblin shakes hands with Graham Showalter. Seated is Nelle Fairchild Rote and behind Diblin is Mike Chervanik.
Joe Diblin during his time in the Army Air Corps.
NORTHUMBERLAND — The valley lost one of its true treasures this week. Joe Diblin, military officer, pilot, writer and friend to so many, died Thursday, Jan. 7. He was 103.
An accomplished collegiate athlete as well, Diblin shined in just about everything he attempted over the course of his long life. He will perhaps be most remembered for his tireless advocacy on behalf of local veterans.
Diblin penned a weekly column for decades in The Standard-Journal and more recently in the Daily Item. His mission, as he so often stated, was to ensure the voices of veterans were not forgotten.
Himself a veteran of the Army Air Corps, the precursor to the Air Force, Diblin was charged with instructing young pilots on the newest American bomber at the time — the B-24 Liberator. The B-24 was designed to make longer bombing runs, which would become so crucial during the island-hopping campaign in The Pacific during World War II. He also served as an instructor on two-engine advanced aircraft.
It was Diblin and his crew which famously discovered a seemingly minor flaw in the design of the B-24, which despite the early issues, played such a crucial role in the Allied victory in Europe and the Pacific during World War II.
Diblin remembered the incident, which occurred in Smyrna, Tenn., as he was training pilots on the massive bomber.
"The B-24 had a very bad reputation at the time," said Diblin. "We were fortunate in the way it happened."
Bombers had exploded in flight, claiming entire crews, so salvaging information to assist in identifying the cause had eluded investigators. Diblin often recalled the day he found the cause of the problem on what had then become known as the "boom-boom bomber."
"The B-24 is a four-engine bomber, so no one can remember everything on it," he said. "There's a checklist. My crew chief was with me to assist and after we took off I sent him back to turn the hydraulics off in the back bay. He said there was smoke, so I dove straight down