ProductCart Shopping Cart Software Forums : Small Miscellaneous Things

Small Miscellaneous Things : How about just using a URL shortener...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:35:53 +0000

Author: mhuttman
Subject: 4993
Posted: 22-February-2012 at 3:35pm

How about just using a URL shortener like bit.ly when giving out the URLs? You even get "Twitter friendly" URLs out of the deal.

Small Miscellaneous Things : Amazon.com which I love...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 20:16:42 +0000

Author: Ludwig
Subject: 4993
Posted: 18-February-2012 at 8:16pm

Amazon.com which I love is like the Walmart of the internet, so the aesthetic of that site will be different than say a site that sells nothing but expensive jewelry. The latter site would be more concerned about how the URL appears.

Ex: http://www.cartier.us/show-me/timepieces/w7100009-calibre-de-cartier-watch

Also, I just manually put a url in all lower-case letters, and copy/pasted it in other browsers and the page still loads okay... so I'm assuming it's something that could possibly be done.

Edited by Ludwig - 18-February-2012 at 8:27pm

Small Miscellaneous Things : Indeed, perhaps when the url's...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:34:32 +0000

Author: Hamish
Subject: 4993
Posted: 18-February-2012 at 9:34am

Indeed, perhaps when the url's are that different. Seo friendly yes, but it's only with a small amount of time. If amazon don't think it worth the effort that's a pretty good indicator that it really isn't worth stressing about ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B002LVUWFE for their all important kindle ) Re lowercase - no, ProductCart runs on windows servers only, so case is important. Honestly, any e-commerce business should be focussing on more important aspects of the business and software than this. Precisely because of that I'm bowing out of this particular thread.

Small Miscellaneous Things : Lots of people look at the...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:02:11 +0000

Author: Ludwig
Subject: 4993
Posted: 18-February-2012 at 7:02am

Lots of people look at the URL especially when people link to your site on a forum... and having a clean URL is important to the aesthetics of your site... what would you rather have:

This: http://www.domain.com/board/topic=f&aqi=g8g-s1g1&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=2333l2700l0l2958l4l4l0l0l0l0l90l300l4l4l0

Or

This: http://www.domain.com/board/topic/stuff/

Also, is there anyway to change the SEO Url to all lower-case letters? Right now it seems to follow the capitalization used in the product title, but if you notice urls on any major site - the entire URL is always in all lower case letters.

Edited by Ludwig - 18-February-2012 at 7:03am

Small Miscellaneous Things : I'm really doubtful about...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:26:16 +0000

Author: Hamish
Subject: 4993
Posted: 18-February-2012 at 6:26am

I'm really doubtful about the benefits of this. Apart from developers and search engines who really looks at the url anyway?! And those that do are quite likely to think a url is incomplete without a .htm/l
It's like punctuation, people are habituated to www and :htm/l imho.

Small Miscellaneous Things : Well, that's an even bigger...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:46:05 +0000

Author: Guests
Subject: 4993
Posted: 17-February-2012 at 9:46pm

Well, that's an even bigger can of worms. Sure, that would be lovely -- "a pretty URL" as they are called ... but ...

This would essentially tell IIS to look in a sub-directory which doesn't exist (very different than looking for a file that doesn't exist) and would have to be handled via URL rewriting or when the server.transfer occurs, it's going to load the page as if it were in the wrong directory. Here's an example for you:

http://pc45a-wms-net.3060.wmsmerchantservices.com/productcart/pc/my-prodname/

This is basically an "out of the box" pc site with nothing modified to protect against the location of all manner of things and none of our usual URL rewriting tricks.

Here's an example of that sort of thing being handled just for a proper 404 handling page on a PC site:

http://www.nancyboy.com/my-prodname/

First of all, in the interest of being "pretty", we've rewritten away the /productcart/pc/ sub-directories, and we've made sure that in our URL Rewriting we can find the correct locations for JavaScript libraries & such and assure that all of the images and CSS & links are called from the root on down, etc.

Now, imagine all of the work you'd have to do in addition to that if this were a category or product page. I dunno. I'd have to think about it a bit more an play with it.

That's not to say it can't be done. But that's about all the time I can give to it for now.

If you are super serious about it to the point of wanting to pay for a customization here, we could do it, but we'd most likely need to use URL rewriting inside IIS to avoid having to literally rewrite a whole lot of ProductCart.

Small Miscellaneous Things : Thanks for all that, but maybe...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:45:01 +0000

Author: Ludwig
Subject: 4993
Posted: 17-February-2012 at 8:45pm

Thanks for all that, but maybe an even better way to do it... would it be possible to just put a "/" at the end of the url instead of .html or .htm? so it would be like: http://www.domain.com/store/pc/product-one-1p1/

It's about aesthetics, and it is quite important... SEO friendly urls are more than just about rankings, they also look nicer and cleaner.

Small Miscellaneous Things : D'oh! I can't believe...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:31:19 +0000

Author: Guests
Subject: 4993
Posted: 17-February-2012 at 8:31pm

D'oh! I can't believe I forgot to mention 404.asp -- the "input" side of it all.

I honestly don't see why this would be worth the effort, even with wanting to keep the extensions the same as with other pages. Honestly, though, who's really going to care?

On the generation side of it all, I believe the file list I mentioned should be complete. So, as long as everything on the link generation side uses .html and everything in 404.asp mirrors that, it should work.

The tricky part (or at least the part that would require experience) is with the trimming off the ".htm" parts of the process in 404.asp

For example:

		' Trim Off .htm from Product ID 		If	((Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId),1)="m") And _
			(Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-1,1)="t") And _
			(Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-2,1)="h") And _
			(Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-3,1)=".")) Then
			intProductId = Left(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-4)
		End If

Instances of this procedure would need to be changed like so:

		' Trim Off .htm from Product ID
		If	((Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId),1)="l") And _
			(Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-1,1)="m") And _
			(Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-2,1)="t") And _
			(Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-3,1)="h") And _
			(Mid(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-4,1)=".")) Then
			intProductId = Left(intProductId,Len(intProductId)-5)
		End If

Edited by Sean@WMS - 17-February-2012 at 8:31pm

Small Miscellaneous Things : SEO ranking won't be affected...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:50:42 +0000

Author: Ludwig
Subject: 4993
Posted: 17-February-2012 at 7:50pm

SEO ranking won't be affected since this is the first time turning on SEO friendly URLs and I wanted to do it because .html is more common ending and it matches the rest of the html pages on the site.

Edited by Ludwig - 17-February-2012 at 8:01pm

Small Miscellaneous Things : The real question is.... WHY?...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:40:02 +0000

Author: Hamish
Subject: 4993
Posted: 17-February-2012 at 7:40pm

The real question is.... WHY? Changing it makes absolutely zero difference apart from damaging your existing seo ranking by changing it!