Changing file location in URL

[rumapop]

Hi,
I’m sorry if this is really simple but I’m not quite sure how to go about it, or how to explain it so please bear with me!

What I would really like is to have our main website running, but then to have a section/product on a slightly different location so that people can enter part of the site that they have found from a unique editorial/advertising promotion e.g,:

normal site for customers: site.co.uk/acatalog/product.html
specific promotion link from advert: site.co.uk/augprom/acatalog/product1.html

I know that the search engines may pull up the promotion link, but this doesn’t worry me too much as it will only be available for a short time-period and if some people find it then it’s not the end of the world.

I did consider giving a username and password for people to use but then it can get a little complicated especially when there is a small area to get the promotion across.

Thanks to anyone who can help
Lucy

[leehack]

Not easily possible as all pages are placed in the same place. You'd probably be better creating a section that was not accessible through your menu or sitemap, but existed as a page on a site, an orphaned page in other words. You could setup htaccess to redirect but it means you will have to get involved manually, which is never a great idea. I'd stick with where it is, remove any links to it and see what methods you can use to monitor it that way personally.

[Bonjour]

I'm looking at a similar problem.

I'm going to set up a suitable section or product with the name 'advert' for example, so that when my magazine advert goes to print I can monitor the traffic on my stats. I was going to print my url as www.mysite/advert

However will that work or do I have to do www.mysite/acatalog/advert or even www.mysite/acatalog/advert.html?

If this is the case is there any way round this as no one is going to bother typing all that in.

I imagine people have come across this problem all the time, but I cannot see any solutions posted.

I also read somewhere that you can change the 'acatalog' name, but forgot where I saw it, but that maybe won't help anyway.

Any ideas please?

Thanks

Helen

[leehack]

Open up your network settings window and you can see where it can be changed, not advised on an existing site though unless you know what you are doing.

For your other problem, you need to find out whether you can use htaccess and if so learn how to use it to auto-redirect from one page to another.

[pinbrook]

However will that work or do I have to do www.mysite/acatalog/advert or even www.mysite/acatalog/advert.html?

the first url will take people to www.mysite/acatalog/advert which is a folder, hopefully you will have index.html within the folfer

the 2nd url will go to www.mysite/acatalog/advert.html which is a page within the acatalog folder.

Personally i'd use mysite/acatalog/advert/index.html and track visitos to it, then use htaccess to forward visitors of that page when you aren't running a promotion

[Bonjour]

Thanks for info.

So are you basically saying then, that I will have to print the longer style url in the magazine, there's no short option (www.site/advert)?

The redirection is from one page to another, but they are all going to have the site/acatlog/whatever as their url?

H

[leehack]

site.com/promo is about the shortest you can get and then as already mentioned, you get htaccess to auto-redirect to the actual url.

[Bonjour]

Sorry to be a dimbat but...

So I print in the magazine mysite.co.uk/promo for customers to put in their browser and then set up the htaccess thing to redirect to my home page url or whatever.

Where do I put the redirection code?

This is what I have found re htaccess:

Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html (all on 1 line)

But I'm getting confused, if I have to have an old dir/old file, don't I have to have a page on my site called promo and if so, won't this again have the problem of having acatalog in the url?

Sorry my head hurts

[leehack]

The old URL (in your example) is effectively the URL you are putting in the advert. The idea of a redirect is that you are telling SEs and visitors that it no longer exists here, but i will take you to where it is. Think of it like you telling the Post Office that you've moved address, so they redirect your post to the new address. The htaccess file sets the page to which they should be directed to, once they have put in what you have advertised.

[dallen]

...if I have to have an old dir/old file...

the old directory doesn't have to actually exist. you're just redirecting people from a simple dummy URL (yoursite.com/promo) to a real URL (yoursite.com/acatalog/promo/index.html)

[Bonjour]

Thanks guys

I've spoken to my hosting company TechnoWeb to check for htaccess and we have got it sorted. Not only that, but I have got 3 different redirects set up.

Leaps & bounds Rodney, leaps & bounds!!

Helen x

[leehack]

This time next year, we'll be mill............