Custom web addresses
‘Friendly’ URLS are web addresses that are written in a form that is easily read and understood. If this option has NOT been turned on, the addresses for your individual pages will look something like this: http://www.website.com/?node=165, which isn’t clear about the content of the page. If friendly URLs have been activated, your addresses will be in the form: http://www.website.com/about-us. This is more understandable to both your visitors and more helpful in search engine results.
Friendly URLs are based on the title of each individual page but with hyphens (-) in place of spaces. Punctuation such as apostrophes are removed and if another page with an identical title already exists an incremental number will be added to the end e.g. /about-us2.
You may wish to manually select what the address of certain pages are going to be, for example if a page has a very long title or it is several levels deep in your site you may want a short address for it. To do this right click on the page you wish to change and select properties then the address tab.
Within the address tab there is a checkbox labelled Automatic web address? If this is ticked the name of the page will be used as the address. Un-tick this box to edit the address and a text box will appear underneath it labelled Custom URL.
The text you enter in this box will appear on the end of your main web address e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com/alumni. Spaces cannot be used within this text so use hyphens (-), underscores (_) or forward slashes (/) instead. The text MUST start with a letter or number NOT a character so _alumni is not allowed.
