I have so many questions, I don’t know where to begin. Let me give you a brief description and solicit any advice people can offer.
My websites use URL’s that look like this:
MySite/People/Ulysses_S_Grant
I’m in the middle of a huge upgrade and may upgrade further to a CMS (probably Drupal or WordPress) in the near future. I’m wondering if I should change my URL’s while I’m at it. The general consensus appears to be that hyphens are better than underscores. Accordingly, I may change my URL’s to this:
MySite/People/Ulysses-S-Grant
I could also change my URL’s to lower case…MySite/People/ulysses-s-grant…though I’m leaning towards not going that route. But what about characters, like periods?
MySite/People/Ulysses-S.-Grant
What about accents and other special punctuation marks?:
MySite/People/José-Martí
What about parentheses, like this?:
MySite/World/Georgia-(country)
And if I change my URL’s, I’m also going to have to forward visitors from the old URL’s to the new URL’s.
I’m thinking of covering all my bases by looking for a script that accepts all URL’s that 1) match the characters in my database, 2) regardless of whether multiple words are separated by -, _, %20 or (space). Thus, any of the following URL’s would default to the database value (Ulysses-S.-Grant):
Ulysses-S.-Grant
Ulysses_S._Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
ulysses-s-grant
Wikipedia has a similar function. If you read an article about “Some Person” and replace the URL Some_Person with Some Person or some_person, it will default to Some_Person.
One other problem I have to deal with: I don’t want my statistics to show 101 hits for This-URL, 13 hits for This_URL, 6 hits for this-url, etc. I only want to know how many visitors made it to This-URL.
Does anyone have any general advice? I’m leaning towards hyphens with first letters upper case and limited special characters (e.g. MySite/People/Ulysses-S.Grant and MySite/World/Georgia-(Country)). However, I’m not sure how to deal with accents and might simply replace People/José-Martí with People/Jose-Marti.
Thanks for any tips.