Making short links

18 January 2008

Summary

• Printing long Web addresses on your Web page may cause it to scroll off the screen.
• As a result, you should avoid printing long Web addresses on the Global Collaborative.
• You should use meaningful link text, instead.

• If you have to print a Web address on your Web page, try to make it as short as practical.
• You can shorten internal Web addresses by renaming your folders and files.
• You should do this as soon as you create them, so that you don't break any links.
• You can shorten external Web addresses by using a redirection service such as TinyURL.

The long and the short of it

Long Web addresses can sometimes cause difficulties.  They are hard to remember and hard to repeat.  Imagine reading out the address of this page to someone over the telephone, for example.

"http://www.globalcollab.org/
contact-gc/using-the-global-collaborative/
making-short-links"

On the Global Collaborative, they can cause particular problems.  The Global Collaborative doesn't wrap long Web addresses well. If you include a long Web address as text on a page, it will force all the text to disappear off the right hand side of the page.  And it doesn't even allow you to scroll sideways, which is a real problem.

Here is an example of the problem of long Web addresses on the Global Collaborative.

There are two solutions to this problem:

1. Don't print the Web address on your page.
2. Make the Web address shorter.

1. Avoid including Web addresses

Generally, there is no need to include a Web address in your page. Most of the time, you are better off using a meaningful link. Meaningful links are clearly written short phrases that indicated what the page at the other end will be.

The following three examples show different ways to present the same information.  Please note that these are made-up example links and will not work. 

Poor example: Raw Web addresses

• About the Foozel: http://www.example.com/foozel/about-the-foozel
  
• The Foozel's enemy: http://www.example.com/black-pigeon/foozel-eating-habits
  
• Buy Foozel food: http://www.example.com/shop?product=food&animal=foozel

Raw Web addresses like this are very hard to read.  Often, people will scan a Web page to quickly get a sense of what it is about.  Their eyes will flick from link to link.  If your links are naked Web addresses, they will get no idea what the page is about.  Moreover, if a reader is blind and having the screen automatically read out to them, they will need to listen to "h t t p colon slash slash w w w period example period...".  Not very easy to understand.

Poor example: Poor link text

• Click here for information about the Foozel.
• To find out about the natural enemy of the Foozel, click here.
• Or, if you want to buy Foozel food, click here.

Poor link text is just as bad as raw Web addresses.  People scanning the page still won't get any idea what it is about.  Blind readers, who often skip from link to link, will just hear "Click here. Click here. Click here."

Good example: Meaningful link text

I have collected some information about the Foozel, and its natural enemy, the Black Pigeon.
Please remember to buy food for your Foozel.

This example reads better. It is more meaningful for people who are scanning the links on the page.  Each link is a meaningful phrase that indicates what you will find if you click on the link.

2. Make your Web addresses shorter

Sometimes, there are valid reasons for including a raw Web address on your page.  You might want people to see a Web address if they receive a printed version of the page.  It might be a required part of a citation, such as in the foot-notes of an academic paper. For whatever reason, you might want to include a raw Web address on the page. 

In that case, you should try to make it a short Web address.

There are two types of links on the Global Collaborative, internal links and external links. They require two different approaches to shorten them.

2.1 Internal links

The Global Collaborative can generate extremely long Web addresses if you are not careful.  A Web address on the Global Collaborative is made up of:

• The Global Collaborative base address: http://www.globalcollab.org/
• All the folder names that your Web page is sitting in: contact-gc/ using-the-global-collaborative/
• The title of your Web page: making-short-links

http://www.globalcollab.org/
contact-gc/using-the-global-collaborative/
making-short-links

This means that if you use long folder names or page titles, your Web address can get very long, very quickly.

However, you can shorten the Web address of your folder names and file titles on the Global Collaborative.

1. Log onto the Global Collaborative.
2. Create your folder or file.
3. Go up one level to the folder that contains your new folder or file.
4. Choose [Contents] to display the contents of the folder.
5. Tick the folder or file whose Web address you want to shorten.
6. Choose [Rename] from the bottom of the list.
7. Shorten the text in the [New Short Name] box.  Make it concise, but meaningful.
8. Choose [Rename all] to save your changes.
9. Look at your folder or Web page to make sure that the changes are correct.

In the example shown above, the title of the page is "My great page that is all about Foozels. Love em all."  Normally, that would create an enormously long Web address.  However, the short name of the page is "foozels".  This is the bit that will appear in the Web address.  It is nice and short, while still being meaningful.

There are two important things to remember:

• Rename your Web addresses as soon as you create a folder or a page.
• Use real words, if you can.

It is important to rename your Web addresses as soon as you create a folder or a page so that you don't break any links to that page. If you change the Web address of a page or folder, then any links using the old name will break.  That means that less people will be able to find you page, and you will have to fix all your own links that point to the old address.

For example, if your address was
    http://www.example.com/black-pigeon/foozel-eating-habits
and you change it to
    http://www.example.com/black-pigeon/food
then anything that is linked to the old address will break. 

If you change your Web addresses when create the file or folder, that won't happen.

It is also a good idea to use real words when you shorten your Web addresses, if you can.  Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, rank the words that they index according to where they appear in a Web page.  Words that appear in the Web address are very good indications of what a page is about, so they given greater weight than other words. 

People use real words when they search.  So, if you use real words in your Web addresses, and they are looking for those words, they have a greater chance of finding you.

For example, if your address was
    http://www.example.com/black-pigeon/foozel-eating-habits
and you change it to
    http://www.example.com/black-pigeon/fooz-e-hab
then people will have less chance of finding your page. Nobody searches for 'hab' when they are interested in 'habits'.

2.2 External links

Sometimes people in other organizations create very long Web addresses. Newspapers, for example, often create Web address that include the date and a code word and some words from the title of the article.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/
antiwhaler-would-do-it-again/
2008/01/18/1200590653618.html

You have no control over what they do.

However, you can still publish links that point to these articles, if you need to.  Services such as TinyURL specialize in providing you with short Web addresses to replace other people's long Web addresses.

TinyURL is quick and easy to use.

1. Copy the long Web address that you want to make shorter.
2. Go to the TinyURL Web site (http://tinyurl.com/).
3. Paste in the long Web address.
4. Choose [Make TinyURL].
5. Copy the resulting Web address and use it in your page.

TinyURL and similar redirection services have one disadvantage. They obscure the information contained in the original Web address. For example, reading the long Web address:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/
antiwhaler-would-do-it-again/
2008/01/18/1200590653618.html

tells me something about the page that I am going to visit.

• It is from Theage or The Age, a commercial organisation in Australia.
• It is news.  In fact, it is world news.
• It was published in 2008, on the 18 January.
• It is an article about an unrepentant anti-whaler.

You can partially avoid that problem by using TinyURL's preview page.  The preview Web address will take people to an intermediate page which lists the Web address that they are finally going to.  However, many people find this is distracting and confusing.  They would rather just go to the actual page.

Summary

• Printing long Web addresses on your Web page may cause it to scroll off the screen.
• As a result, you should avoid printing long Web addresses on the Global Collaborative.
• You should use meaningful link text, instead.

• If you have to print a Web address on your Web page, try to make it as short as practical.
• You can shorten internal Web addresses by renaming your folders and files.
• You should do this as soon as you create them, so that you don't break any links.
• You can shorten external Web addresses by using a redirection service such as TinyURL.
  

Please give me a call or drop me a line if any of this is unclear.

Jonathan O'Donnell