Knee Deep in Web Content, Among Other Updates
We are spending much of our time these days writing content for the new site. This includes writing many profiles for the new “Faces” faculty, student, and alumni Flash piece, a bank of stories for the new home page’s Wall gallery, and content for the many new pages we will be adding to the site. It’s all hands on deck for the Communications and Marketing staff as each member of our office is writing Web profies. We’re also gearing up to have a handful of students to assist us during winter break with pulling content out of our current Web site and readying it so it can be easily posted in the new CMS.
Should We Use Underscores or Hyphens in URLs?
As part of our implementation of Ingeniux CMS, we’ve had to decide how we want URLs to read (i.e., how will the page name read in a browser’s address bar).
Out of the box, Ingeniux displays page URLs as numbers with an .xml extension (e.g., 345.xml). Although, this method is short and clean, numbers aren’t real memorable. It’s much easier for site visitors to remember academics.html or news.html than 345.xml. You have some inclination where academics.html will take you when clicked, whereas 345.xml is pretty vague.
To present more human-readable URLs, Ingeniux allows us to utilize structured URLs using a hyphen or an underscore as a separator and specify .htm or .html as an extension. So which is better, hyphens or underscores? For me it has always come down to usability, something we touch on during each CMS training. It is much easier to read a Web address done in hyphens than underscores, especially when including URLs in print. If URLs appear as underlined text, the underscores are often harder to read.
When it comes down to it, search engines treat both underscores and hyphens differently. Google for example treats hyphens as separators or dividers while underscores are not treated as such as shown below.
Underscores vs. Hyphens
Example 1: www.anselm.edu/my_web_page.html
Example 2: www.anselm.edu/my-web-page.html
How Google reads these URLs.
Example 1: mywebpage
Example 2: my web page
A New and Improved Search Engine
One of the most requested new Web site features we heard from faculty, staff, and students during our redesign discovery process was improved search. To paraphrase some of the comments we heard – “when I search the college site I get a bunch of results that have nothing to do with what I’m searching for.”
So one of the priorities of the redesign project was to improve site search. So after looking at several different options, we purchased a Google Mini search appliance, which arrived in the mail this week from Google.