Hi Im sorry if this is a vague question but all the solutions I find seem to assume there is a pattern when doing 1000s of redirects.
My issue is that we inherited a new website and were asked to make it live, host it and basically be the guys working on it from now on, they werent happy with the developers that built the new site.
The old site is a totally different platform to the new one and basically even though there is a vague pattern in terms of products, categories, etc, really I dont see anything that I could solidly work as a shortcut without losing lots of direct redirects of products.
Some products have more words in the new urls than the old ones, categories have been moved around and recategorized etc.
What is the standard practice when the sitemap has this many urls (approx 5000)?
Interestingly enough , i googled the site using site:www.example.com and 32 pages showed up, so I was tempted to simply do the redirects for these and leave the rest. Is this is a big no no?
Related
I'm north of 50, and can't always make the connection from my eyes to my fingers while looking at the screen rather than the keys, resulting in things like "www,something.tld" being entered into whichever program (Windows run dialog, browser, something else)
Wouldn't the browser developers have addressed minor flubs like this a LONG time ago, and accepted them for the most obvious result?
Or is there something else implied by the above that I'm missing?
dL
Consider the fact there there are now over a billion Web sites on the internet (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/how-many-websites-are-there/408151/).
This means that there is a good chance that www.example.com may be a completely different Web site than www.exaample.com, www.examplee.com, etc.
Also, in your specific case with the comma, www,something.tld--modern Web browsers will usually do a Web search (using Yahoo, Google, Bing, etc.) for text you put in the address bar that doesn't match a valid domain name (especially when there is a comma in it), because it has no way of knowing if you really meant to put the comma in there.
Computers only ever do what they're told to do. They will also take you literally when asking them to do something, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. That is their purpose, and it allows people to do ridiculous things with them - sometimes. It also allows for very similar yet distinct URLs.
Since commas aren't valid characters to use in filenames it is fairly safe to say they can't be used in URLs. As for why it hasn't been fixed, developers like to be lazy / efficient and there hasn't really been a need to fix it when most people will just use a search engine like Google and click links instead of manually entering addresses. Plus most people will have favourites in their browser to go to instead of searching each time.
Recently Chrome has gotten better with misspelled URLs and if a page doesn't exist it will offer to search for pages including similar words.
For example:
There may be a plugin out there to convert all commas into stops but I am yet to find it.
The number of websites is a good argument, but I think it cannot be applied to commas.
Although there are nearly 2 billion websites out there (https://www.millforbusiness.com/how-many-websites-are-there/) this is still not the reason for not fixing this kind of minor issues.
No website uses a comma in its URL. Accordingly, it's not possible to access any website with a web browser in case you type a comma instead of a dot.
I agree with the question and do not understand why this is still an issue.
I have for several years tried to get an estimate of the emacs user base.
Does anyone have good estimates besides the naive guess of the Linux/unix install base?
Getting hard numbers for this seems fairly difficult. Here's what I found:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/emacswiki.org/?metric=uv
Where it says in May 2010 there were about 13,000 unique visitors that month. Alexa
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/emacswiki.org
says that about .001% of all the Internet users visited emacswiki.org in the last month. Both sites put emacswiki.org in the top 150,000 sites on the web. It seems to me the number of times each version of emacs is downloaded could be discovered and might shed some more light on the topic.
I leave the transformation of these lies^H^H^H^Hstatistics into a number of users as an exercise for the reader.
I personally loathe background music on a website. My client has opposite feelings on the subject. I added music because the customer is always right, though I'd like to revisit the subject with them.
Almost everyone would agree that it is annoying and wastes precious bandwidth but are there any usability studies or a recommendation for someone esteemed in the profession that can provide a valid argument against background music?
Usability is not the only concern. Consider the following scenarios:
1 - Someone browses to the site while at work in a shared office, and now all of their co-workers think "Gee, he's wasting time".
2 - Someone browses to the site while in a room with a sleeping baby, and now they have to spend an hour getting him/her back to sleep.
3 - Someone browses to the site while they are listening to their own music, and now they hear a cacaphony of shrieks until one source is muted.
Also, consider that any benefit gained from the music on your website will be totally lost on anyone who has their speakers muted. So your audience can be divided between:
A - People who cannot hear the music
B - People who can hear it, but do not like it
C - People who can hear it, and do like it
I would not care to estimate the percentages associated with each of these groups, but keep in mind that category "B" is actively offended by your website. To take a line from the hippocratic oath, one rule of web design should be "do no harm".
Metrics. You'll never be able to convince a business person with an emotional answer.
If you investigate the situation empirically you'll be able to give them something irrefutable.
I would would try an experiment: (get google analytics)
have one site with the music as-is, measure the bounce rate,etc
have an identical site without music, measure the bounce rate,etc
Have the server randomly serve up the different pages for a couple weeks (until you get a significant data) and see what happens.
Maybe we're wrong (I hate music too). I hope your customer is wrong, but who knows.
You could also add a survey link and try to get people to answer that as well (but without an incentive that might not work)
Stats can be your friend here :)
I would also:
(calculate the size of the audio file(s)*the number of hits*months)/cost of GB per month
Then tell them how much money they are wasting.
Basically, it boils down to this:
Audio on websites is a bad idea. No one likes it.
Try to educate your client that it is a bad idea. (It's annoying, different levels of sound can cause problems, yadda yadda) Mention that most users don't take sites seriously if they use sound. It's a very '99 thing to do.
If you client does not budge, (politely) remind him/her that they are paying you for your expertise as an internet professional. You are the expert on the web, and they have hired you to give your expertise.
If they still won't budge, keep the sound and make sure they are happy. The bottom line is keeping the client happy.
Music also interferes with screen reader users. I'm a blind computer user and nothing annoys me more then having music start playing and drowned out my speech program that's trying to read the site. Nothing will make me close a website quicker then unwanted audio.
It took a bit but I found a site that talks about usability on web sites.
They have a video on the right hand side of this page:
http://www.ciaromano.com/evaluating/testing.php
It shows why audio ads are not a good idea on websites.
Hope this helps.
G-Man
Just make sure that there is a way to turn it off. It really depends on the type of Website, because multimedia-heavy sites (i.e. sites for Movies or Games) can benefit from it, but if I'm listening to some of my own music, I definitely want a way to turn it off.
Oh and please, no crappy MIDI-Files that people already hated in 1993 when they were novel.
This is a tough one -- and what's amazing is that at the moment, I have a client who's demanding the exact same thing.
Personally I don't know of any usability studies addressing this topic specifically, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence out there from users complaining about the intrusiveness or outright corniness of unrequested background music. * That said, clients still ask for it. Best you can do is try to explain the situation to them, try to gather a few good examples of people complaining about it from the Web at large, build a case, and hope the client goes for it.
In my case, she completely agrees that it's potentially annoying, understands it cuts against the grain of user expectations and politeness, but wants it anyway. So I'm building it. Whaddyagonnado.
* Indeed, you could probably use this thread as evidence! Good luck.
Consider taking a different path with the client.
Ask them what the purpose for the music is...
If it is to install a particular feeling or mood with the visitor of the site, consider taking them through all the points mentioned in answers here and discuss how that may violate the intended for the music.
Then you will be able to talk to the client about different ways to instill the same "ambience" to the website without resorting to music. This is really a design issue and not usability.
If the background music/sound was to convey some information, then it is a usability issue as people who for technological or biological reasons cannot hear the sound at the correct volume will miss out on that. Therefore the site is not as usable as it should be.
Unfortunately, as a service provider of sorts, all we can do is cringe and give the customer what they want - after documenting your disapproval both commented in the code and in writing to the client, of course.
Pardon me, but i have a different opinion about loading music in the website. With all due respect I have for the answer posters of this thread.
I see visits to e-commerce websites like going to a shopping complex. Where you have a cart, varieties of products, checkout counters and background music to make your stay as comfortable and interesting as possible.
There's a whole psychological reason as to what certain slow paced music can do to certain parts of the brain. Some studies even suggested that certain music play a role in motivating customers to purchase more items. Check this site
This can definitely be a plus point in a website. Of course it depends on what kind of website it is. However, a slow and non-vocal music shouldn't necessarily disrupt one's attention; rather it might have the opposite effect.
My justification is that when a potential customer visits a site, he is only using one of his senses while browsing through the pages. His eyes! I'm saying why not allow him (if he wants) to use his sense of hearing that would encourage him (not only through the means of displaying fancy texts, design and animations that looks nice to the eyes) but also to capture his attention through music (allowing him to be more in touch with the site).
Its obviously not possible to trigger his sense of smell and taste. But why limit it to only the eyes. Why not use the ears too!
Whether you choose to put music into your site or not, MichaelStum's post about having an option to turn off the music is highly essential.
Of course in the end its all about the amount of traffic that comes to your website. For this matter, #Cbrulak's idea of using Google Analytics would be a realistic approach for different individuals.
I have a pretty simple app on the web (written in Flex) which is very straightforward to use once it has data inside it. The steps to get data inside it are themselves also pretty simple, but not at all obvious to my audience when they first log into my app.
I have been wrestling with how to communicate the data setup process to my users without referring them to a separate help. I also don't want to clog my lovely, elegant UI (which has uniformly been praised for its clarity from my current users and matches their processes very well) with wizards, or worse still an annoying animated paperclip.
I have a very rich set of tools available for the web UI but I am looking for inspiration and wondered if anyone had experienced good web-based, intuitive, unobtrusive, genuinely helpful process/usage instructions embedded in an application and could point me to a link so I can take a look for myself.
Failing that anyone got any bright ideas? There are about 5 steps involved each one visiting a different page of the existing app to enter/upload data.
Have you taken a look at:
http://www.askthecssguy.com/2007/03/form_field_hints_with_css_and.html
I believe there is a jquery or prototype or mootools or whatever framework that goes a couple steps beyond the above and walks a user through what to do. My google-fu isn't coming through right now so I can't seem to find it.
You could display the links to the data setup pages in a small strip on your main page like this (pardon the ugliness - this is just a usability idea):
alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/052b13acb7.jpg
The steps they've already completed are greyed out (I assume they don't have to complete these steps in sequence). When they mouse over a step they get a brief description, and then full details when they click through to the actual step page. You could have descriptive icons for each step instead of hyperlinks, of course.
I had the idea of a search engine that would index web items like other search engines do now but would only store the file's title, url and a hash of the contents.
This way it would be easy to find items on the web if you already had them and didn't know where they came from or wanted to know all the places that something appeared.
More useful for non textual items like images, executables and archives.
I was wondering if there is already something similar?
Check out the wikipedia page on locality sensitive hashing. There's also a good page hosted by a research on MIT.
In general, there are several flavors available: hashes for strings (such as simhash), sets or 0/1 features (such as min-wise hashes), and for real vectors.
The main trick for numerical hashes is basically dimension reduction, so far. For strings, the idea is to come up with a representation that's robust in the face of minor edits.
I'm also doing a little research in this field, although I guess stackoverflow might not be the right place for nascent work.
The question seems to focus on exact match hashes, which we understand better than nearest-neighbor approaches, and are indeed worthwhile, especially if people can share tags and other metadata that way.
As #rjmunro notes, hash-based searching is a popular idea in the P2P world, and Bitzi did pretty much this, though they have shut down and their Bitpedia (Digital Media Encyclopedia) isn't hosted there any more, though some of it at least is still available at Archive.org.
Bitzi also produced software like Bitcollider (SourceForge.net),
and the Magnet URI scheme, which allows for specifying a file by hash and is thus a content-based identifier. Various applications support searching at various databases via Magnet URIs as described at that Wikipedia page.
The same idea is popular in the password-cracking scene - see e.g. findmyhash - Python script to crack hashes using online services etc.
Going a step further, I think it would be great if there were databases and online repositories identifying content by hash and providing tags and other metadata about the content from various perspectives. Then I could leave my music collection in its pristine state (no wasted backup space and time), but still tag them myself and add other metadata, via external tag databases. If my applications knew how to grab the tags, it would seem much better than the current system where we modify and copy around big files just to move tags from e.g. my desktop to my phone.
See a related idea at Metadata Independent Hashing for Media Identification & P2P Transfer Optimisation (pdf).
Well, for images, there's http://tineye.com, which will one-up that, and find you similar images too.
It's not a bad idea. Sometimes I find myself stumbled upon some file trying to figure out where it comes from :) But how are you going to track item's sources? Content can be obtained by various means - web browser, download manager, simply by copying from network share.
If I understand your proposal right, http://bitzi.com/ has done this for a while.