Pine City Technical College Goes Live

Is the vet.osu.edu a new site?  The new design is very good (the old one was pretty nice as well).

I did one for a university economics department a while back but it is not an .edu.

Jared updated the OSU site about 6 months ago I think. It was originally a MODx site as well.

rthrash: thanks for the links, checking em all out

I really like vet.osu.edu

Very nice. I really like the design and the site is a piece of cake to navigate, unlike most .edu sites.

My only suggestion would be to take the email address off the contact page before you get inundated with spam and replace it with either eForm, SPForm, or a custom form that lets people communicate with anyone there. Here’s a nice one (unfortunately done in ColdFusion):

http://www.anokaramsey.edu/directory/staff_list.cfm

I don’t think it would be too hard to do in MODx and, if done right, it would let you take all the email addresses off the site.

Bob

Oops. One more thing. You should fix your .htaccess file so this works too:

http://pinetech.edu/

Call me green, but I was unaware the .htaccess had anything to do with the www.domain.com vs domain.com working .. I’ll let them know, I thought it was a dns configuration. PM me if I’m wrong.

The email thing, that was the client’s choice, and quite honestly with good spam filtering it’s not an issue. I post my own email address all over, and I get maybe 1 or 2 spams per week.

It’s both, actually. The dns cname entry for the secondary needs to point the one to the primary A entry, whichever it is.

But the .htaccess file will rewrite the secondary to the primary so that internal urls are consistent. For example, a session started with domain.com won’t be used with www.domain.com, so you can be logged in one minute and out the next. It can get confusing.

Right, the server needs to be configured for both and htaccess is used to define which one to enforce (it will rewrite from one to the other).

I’m working on this very question right now. I’m working on a site where the domain name is: http://domain.com.

If I go to www.domain.com it will display the page with the URL: http://www.domain.com/

From that point on the page URLs switch to: http://domain.com/page.html

I have no entries in .htaccess to redirect any of this.

So I have some questions. If you please.

1. Does it matter which you use: http://domain.com vs http://www.domain.com ? Is there a reason to use one vs the other?

2. What does it mean when you say the sever has to be configured for both? How do I do this?

3. If I want the URL to always be www.domain.com, how do I configure the server (host=hostgator) to this or is this determined from the domain name itself?

4. Then I presume I would add a rewrite to the .htaccess to add www for all the remaining pages in the site?

I appreciate any insight on this one. Thanks.

Terry

Essentially, Susan answered this already:

The dns cname entry for the secondary needs to point the one to the primary A entry, whichever it is.

Just go to wherever the domain is registered and there should be tools available to do this. And the cannonicalization issue is better explained here in a great SEO article:
http://webdesign.verangomedia.com/fixing-cannonicalization-issues-with-extra-domains-such-as-type-domains/