Domain Name Forum

**Votron** · 03-13-2007, 01:27 PM

Good Day to All,

I have a situation that I am hoping I can get an answer here.

1. The City of Surprise, Arizona has an online Store being hosted at monster.com; Domain name: surprisecitystore.com

2. The City of Surprise, Arizona has a website being hosted by our CMS Hosting Company CivicPlus; surpriseaz.com

3. I have a redirect URL as requested by my director: www.surpriseaz.com/store that points to surprisecitystore.com

Situation:

My director would like the domain name www.surpriseaz.com/store be displayed when the user arrives at its final destination surprisecitystore.com/store.

Question:

Is this even possible? If so how can I make this happen?

Conclusion:

I am not sure if programmatically I can make this happen...if so, any assistance anyone can give me will certainly be appreciated.

Have a great day!

Hank Franco
Webmaster - City of Surprise

webmaster@surpriseaz.com

**alexi1329** · 03-13-2007, 02:21 PM

Tell me the program language the site is made and maybe I can help you. Also I think you can made a redirect in the CivicPlus hosting, when a request to domain surprisecitystore.com is made to redirect to surprisecitystore.com/store. If this cannot be achieved by the hosting control panel we`ll try programatically. For sure this can be done.

**ADAM Web Design** · 03-13-2007, 02:39 PM

The question I have in all of this is: why are you doing it the way you're doing it?

First off, a domain name should always have a root page. So your root page in the case of surprisecitystore.com shouldn't be surprisecitystore.com/store, but surprisecitystore.com ... period. This ensures that the URL is both user-friendly (easier to type in) and search engine friendly (root page is always first to be indexed and the one that tends to be easiest to rank for keywords and phrases.)

So why not redirect surpriseaz.com/store using a 301 redirect (permanent web redirect) to surprisecitystore.com , if you're going to do anything? This makes much more sense.

Show your director this thread, too. I'm sure that others will chime in at some point. (Chris, Steve, Forrest, John, st0x...l'il help?)

As far as a 301 redirect is concerned (this is the correct redirect for your circumstances), this would depend on the language(s) supported on the server containing the site doing the redirecting (in this case, the surpriseaz.com site). Here's a sample using ASP:

Code:

Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.surprisecitystore.com/"
Response.End

The last line's important or Googlebot (among others) will choke on the redirect.

Hank: I'm not trying to lay blame or be accusatory here. I'm just trying to explain that the process/idea you have been given isn't the best way to do things.

If your director wants his way on the issue, the only way you're going to pull that off with your existing setup is with frames, and that's a death sentence for an e-commerce site (SEO is next to impossible on a frames-based site and users quite often get confused when they click different links and the address bar doesn't change).

**Votron** · 03-13-2007, 04:23 PM

Good Day

Thanks to all for responding to my request - It appears that this is not a good practice in wanting to display a consistent URL for an eCommerce Site.

Having done further research on this topic; it is for several reasons as discribed on this posting, but some that I have found through-out the Web:

1. Frames - Bad idea if you want the Search Engines to find (query) your site.
2. URL Masking would be an option, but a bad idea progamatically.

I appreicate your responses - If my Director insist on getting this done; I guess I will be back here to see how I can get this accomplished, I will however, share my results - I hope not

Again, Thanks for your responses,

Hank Franco
Webmaster - City of Surprise
webmaster@surpriseaz.com