Managing your website’s URLs

A URL defines the location where you website’s content can be reached. Net-at-hand automatically creates URLs for your content based on the title you give it. For example, if you created a page titled “About Me”, then Net-at-hand would display that page at ”/about-me”.

If you don’t want to think about your website’s URLs then you don’t have to; Net-at-hand will take care of them for you. One thing you should know, however, is that once you publish a content item, Net-at-hand will no longer change the URL for that content item, even if you change the title. This ensures that your content will always be available at that location and links to that page won’t be broken.

Taking complete control

If you enable “show advanced settings” in your user profile (in the “Account” tab) then you have complete control over the URLs for any content item. After you publish a web page, for example, then you can go in and change the URL yourself to whatever you would like. Net-at-hand will no longer change it for you when you change the title, but you can certainly do so.

Net-at-hand also lets you assign multiple URLs to the same content item. This is helpful if you if your page location needs to change, but you don’t want old links to get broken. For example, if you have a page that use d to be at ”/about-me”, but you want it to change to ”/about-us”, then you would just include both of those URLs for the same page. Net-at-hand will automatically change the address for someone who navigates to ”/about-me” to the new address at ”/about-us”. All you have to do is put the URL that you want to be the active, or primary, URL for that content at the top of the list and save it.

A word about slashes

Throughout the web the forward slash is often used in URLs to delineate sections of a website. Net-at-hand’s plugin architecture uses slashes to delineate functions that the plugins are to perform. For this reason the first, or primary, URL for any content item cannot have forwards slashes. Additional URLs that are redirected to the primary URL may have slashes without any problems. This helps if you are migrating a site from another system and you need URLs with forward slashes to redirect to their new URLs.