Quick Tips

Use Descriptive Naming Of Files And Directories

How often do you go to a site only to find things named like this:


http://www.sitename.com/c/200014/d9584B773A96811D3AE3900A0C9E95208.asp

or even:


http://www.sitename.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html

While to a computer those make perfect sense, can you even start to tell me what's you'd think would be found on those pages without actually going to them? If you're like me, probably not.

How about this one:

http://www.sitename.com/articles/john/adovbs/

While it's not perfect, at least it gives you a chance.

(If you're interested, that's the URL to an article on this site written by myself about the adovbs include file. Oh and if you didn't guess based on the URL, my name's John)

While computers can deceipher just about anything... you're visitors probably can't. There's really no reason not to name your files so your visitors will know what they are. You'd be surprised how helpful it can be to a user who's looking for that page they were "just at" on your site. Now that browsers will display a list of URLs you've been to recently, looking through a list of documents in the address bar can actually be quite helpful, but only if the addresses actually mean something.

There's actually a good article on this located at http://www.asp101.com/articles/wayne/extendingnames/default.asp. And the URL illustrates this tip in action... while it may not be the perfect URL, you can at least tell that it's an article by Wayne about "Extending Page Names."