Human Readable URLs and Aliases
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Contensis has been publishing user readable URLs since inception, made possible by our disconnected publishing model.
Why are human readable URLs so important?
From a users' perspective, we see time and time again that allocating a place for something to exist, just like they do using Windows explorer or Finder for the Mac, gives an immediate understanding of how a site is structured and where content lives.
Your users will decide what URLs their content is on, assuming you give them the relevant permissions.
This screenshot shows how an editor can add an alias to any piece of content
Contensis provides many options for surfacing content on more than a single URL, or having entire sections of a site replicated in different ways. Content can also be made available through many of the taxonomic or navigational controls.
The simplest form of content existing on more than one URL is Aliases. Introduced with R6, this functionality allows you to set any URL for any item of content. Instead of www.yourdomain.com/events/event-name.html you can set: www.yourdomain.com/eventName.
Aliases are often very useful for marketing campaigns.
Research is showing that users are navigating more and more using their address bar. If for example they notice they are on a path of /Blogs/RichC/ they will actually remove the "RichC" from the URL and expect to see all blogs.
Some may think that it is only technical users that navigate in this way but in fact many non-technical users are using this technique.
Because Contensis has human readable URLs, we can be sure that people can navigate a Contensis-powered site with ease.
Contensis also has a feature which allows users to navigate using tags. This functionality allows users to filter modules such as the blogs, by just appending tag names to the URL or even publish dates.
Having properly formed URLs helps the site's search engine optimisation. When users create the URLs they will typically include important keywords in the URL that will then be indexed by spiders such as Google.
Contensis allows you to enforce file naming policies, so you can be sure that the URLs are consistent, just another standard feature to enable your end users to provide search engine optimised sites, without even realising they are doing it!