Auto Forwarding Web Users

As the new semester rolls along, some of you may find yourself reworking your web sites. In this rework, one of the things you may find yourself doing is changing the location or name of a file. For many files, this is not a problem, but for important files which others may have bookmarked, this may cause a problem, particularly if the file you moved or renamed is your web site's home page.

Not to fear...for those users who may have bookmarked your old page, you can provide a way to help them change their bookmark to the new page by advising them of the change and then taking them to the new page or location automatically. I'll provide the details of how to do this below.

The reason I mention this is because we have changed the location of the CSU Student Handbook from "www.colstate.edu/student/handbook" to a more appropriate location in the Student Affairs web site: "sa.colstate.edu/handbook." Although we have changed the hyperlinks on the main web site, it may be that many people have this page/location bookmarked. So, it would be reasonable for us to provide a way to tell users this new location. We did this by creating a new page at the old location with the same name as the default page. We then told the user the location of the new page and advised them to change their bookmarks. Lastly, after displaying the location of the new page for five seconds, we automatically loaded the default page at the new location.

To see this is action, visit: http://www.RedirectExample.htm

Here's how you can make this process work for you:

1. Create a new page with the same name as your old page and place this page in the old location. For example, suppose your web site was located at website.colstate.edu and you renamed your home page from "index.html" to "Default.htm" so your web site would be FrontPage compatible. You would then create a new page called "index.html" to replace the original file you just renamed. Since you have not changed the actual location of the web site or the default file, you could leave this new page in the same location as it was previously. If you had moved the location of the site as we did for the handbook, you'd want to put the new file in that old location.

2. In the body of the new page, type in the new name and/or location as well as something to advise users to change their bookmark. In our example, you could type in:

"Our web site has moved. If you have bookmarked this page, please note the new location:http://mywebsite.colstate.edu ."

Note that if the page is the default page, there is no need to specify the page itself.

3. To automatically load the new location, place the following META tag in the <HEAD> section of the new page:

where "URL=http://mywebsite.colstate.edu" is the new location and "5" is the number of seconds before that new location is loaded. You can, of course, change this "5" is anything you think is reasonable. Also, if you're not familiar with the <HEAD> section, look at the HTML version of your page near the top; the <HEAD> section is anywhere between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. When typing in the META tag, be careful of where you place the quote marks and the semi-colon between the CONTENT value and the URL value. Note in the above, there is a quote to the left of the 5, with a semi-colon following the 5, then a quote mark at the end of the URL. Let me know if you have any questions about or problems with the above.

Author: Chris Whitehead, MCP, CSU Webmaster