Question

My freelance web developer is developing a site on Ruby on Rails. Currently the URL structure is

http://abc.com/all?ID=category

Example:

http://abc.com/all?3=CatA

I requested him to structure the URL according to categories, such as

http://abc.com/CatA/3-page-title

but he refused cos it was too much work and cost involved as he is using the same model for Category A, Category B… I thought the URL structure that he is using is messy and not search engine friendly.

My question is, should I add cost to let him do a better structured URL I requested, or should I let the project finish, then do it in the next iteration?

I’m worried that if I do it in the next iteration, all the previous URLs structured in the old way will be purged and when sites that refer to it will show a 404 error. It’s like I have to rebuild the site ranking all over again.

Any other solutions for me? Is that any way to redirect old URLs to new URLs automatically in Rails?

Answer 1

The way your developer is proposing to compose the URLs would be considered something of an anti-pattern is Rails. What you are looking for is close to what Rails does out-of-the-box when using RESTful resource routing, admittedly, I’m guessing as to how CatA and page-title are related to each other. A RESTful Rails route might look like this (using your example):

http://abc.com/categories/3-CatA/pages/10-page-tite

If he really is using Rails, and he knows what he’s doing, then there should be no cost at all to converting to what you want. It just needs the correct routes defined and then a to_param override in your models to get the nice SEO friendly identifiers.