Naming conventions for your web pages
For technical reasons every page created in our content management system must have a unique filename. Authors need to give careful consideration to the creation and saving of new web pages or documents for downloading.
It is important to ensure that newly-created pages or download documents are given a name that has not already been used by another author.
The name selected must still be meaningful (both to the author and to members of the public).
Why does every web page need a unique filename?
The content management systems saves pages as "objects". Each object has to be unique, and it is assigned a unique name. This uniqueness allows the "object" to be displayed faster and more efficiently than traditional file structures and naming conventions would usually permit, and also allows a degree of flexibility in presentation of material online.
How web pages appear to citizens
It is important to remember that the filename you use for your web page (or "object") will appear on the public web site. So do try to avoid calling pages something like "rubbishpage" or "woffle"! Instead, you should use meaningful but concise names - names that describe what the page is about - perhaps 'education-intro' or 'regenerationcontacts', and so on.
Do NOT use spaces or other special characters in page or document filenames
- Please do not use spaces or any other special characters such as '&', '%' or '+' in your page names.
- Please do not use underscores ('_') in page names.
It is OK, however, to use a hyphen - for example 'regeneration-news', but please limit their usage as much as possible.
Names to avoid
Avoid using page names that are highly likely to have been used before elsewhere on the web site. Examples include 'faq', 'help', 'intro', 'homepage', 'contacts'. Instead, for example, consider prefixing your faq page with a unique identifier - say, 'pests-faq'.
Consider devising your own naming convention
You might decide to devise your own convention for naming web pages. For example you could prefix all your pages with the name (or an abbreviation) of the service being described - perhaps 'ctaxhelp' for Council Tax Help.
What happens if I save a web page with a filename that has already been used?
Nothing - apparently! Obtree automatically saves your object using the name you specify but it will add a version suffix to the filename. For example, if you save 'faq', Obtree might save it as 'faq-4' to indicate that this is the fourth instance in the database of an 'faq' filename.
Unfortunately you will not know that this has happened until, at a later time, you try to locate the previously-saved document and discover that it doesn't have the name you thought it had.
Any questions?
If you have any questions regarding naming conventions please email Steve McComb (steve.mccomb@salford.gov.uk) or call 0161-793 2958.
This page was last updated on 19 June 2008
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