[thelist] [fwd] Improving link names on huge website

[Lucy Molinaro]

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Hello all,

First, a (belated) THANKS to all who offered me advice with Flash.

On to my question/quandry --

I have worked as Web Editor for my company's website for the past 2.5
years. We are a non-profit educational organization and offer lots of
resources and information to our members on our website, which has been in
existence for 5 years. Consequently, the site, http://www.ptk.org, is huge
and growing daily.

Over the time I've been with my company, I've used different naming
conventions for links for websections and pages and I've adapted sections
around naming conventions that were in place before I started. The result
is inconsistency in these names throughout the website.

I've been learning over the years, and I've developed a convention that I
feel comfortable with and that works well for the site. I've been
implementing it for about a year, and in all the new pages I create, but
throughout the site there are still pages with cumbersome, non-intuitive
links, like http://www.ptk.org/sprogram/ampromise/ap_intro.htm.

I want to go back and "correct" these links (for instance, I'd like to
change that link in the previous paragraph
to  http://www.ptk.org/americaspromise/), and make them all consistent and
more intuitive. But I also want to make sure our constitutents can still
find these pages -- they're linked throughout the website, printed in
publications, used on the myriad of "chapter" websites affiliated with our
company.

I have thought about creating new pages saved under the new and improved
file names and placing redirect scripts on the old pages. But before I
embark on that big project (our web dept is pretty small -- one
full-timer,
one contract, one part-time), are there any other suggestions anyone has
to
offer? Any short-term suggestions, at that?

I don't know much about web programming, but it is an option. There are
several programmers in the Technology division who work on some web
programming projects.

(Don't know if this is important, but I'm on the digest version of this
list.)

Many thanks,
Lucy