URL Structure - Is this correct? Programming Advice Needed

[Faye234]

Hello

My father is having a website built called www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk. The site consists of different product categories as set out below

1.Engineered Wood, 2. Parquet & Reclaimed and 3. Prefinished Wood

filtering further into colours

1. /lights-greys/, 2. /beiges/, 3, /browns/ and 4. /darks-blacks

and then the brand name for example Vicenza. Example of a clean url **http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys/vicenza/ **

Each and every url is unique

Our programmer has put in place 301 redirects - http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys-engineered-wood/vicenza/ - Is this really needed? It does not look clean and will appear like this is Google. This is a completely new site, a new start up business.

I'm very confused as to why he has done this and concerned this method of programming does now follow "best practice". Can any programmer offer any advice? To get a better idea how the url structure is set out, I have attached a jpg image.

Thank you

Faye

W09qswW.jpg

[DeanAndrews]

Hi,

Firstly I would ask myself, what would I want to see as a person looking for this product. Am I searching for the brand, the type of flooring or the colour

Do people know what engineered, prefinished, reclaimed wood is when looking for flooring, is verona only ever available as Dark Engineered Wood? if so then why have such along url structure.

Rather than:
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks/verona/

Perhaps:
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/verona

OR
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/verona-flooring

[Faye234]

Hi Dean

This is directing away from my question, but yes - there is a big market for folks searching for these flooring types hence our keyword for this url is "black engineered wood". Our split categories allows us to have a more "diverse" keyword spectrum, which further reflects within our url, h1 and page title. Categorises will also allow us to add a variety of different products building our long tail keywords around this.

We probably could shorten the url from http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks/verona/ to http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered/darks-blacks/verona/ as the word "wood" exists within our primary domain name. Thanks for your input Dean, very much appreciated.

Faye

[DeanAndrews]

Hi Faye,

Sorry for going off on a tangent. Personally I would go with the following (to avoid the 301 completely):

http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/ as a parent page

http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/verona as a child page

Then use categories to identify the colours as these are the product variants

Or switch it about to suit yourself, however I think the parent / child / category is the way forward unless you wish to create another taxonomy which is easy for any decent coder.

With custom taxonomies you can create whatever configuration you wish.

[Faye234]

Hi Dean

Please don't apologise. Your feedback is really helpful. Do you know if we can create our preferred categories in word press?

[Faye234]

so we can have our respective "colours" after our main sub categories, even though these colour categories are the same?

/prefinished-wood/browns/

/parquet-reclaimed/browns/

/engineered-wood/browns/

[DeanAndrews]

Hi Faye,

Yes with custom taxonomies. Familiarise yourself with 'Basic diagram on taxonomies and their relationships in Wordpress' over at http://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies and also look at Taxonomy Generator here http://generatewp.com/taxonomy/ for a quick way.

There are also plugins such as http://wp-types.com/ that will allow you to do all this without coding.

[Faye234]

Fantastic! Thanks Dean