Thanks Dave. I hope that tweaks like this will keep the site fast, easy to navigate, and easy to find its information.
Meta-comment: One of the goals of this site is to "raise the discussion level." That requires a certain common knowledge so everyone can participate fully, or available resources to acquire the required knowledge. Articles are formal documentation of the knowledge that is frequently discussed in the forums, but they require considerable effort to write, copyedit, and publish. So I looked for ways of leveraging the building knowledge base in the forums. A few of these ideas are complete:
- Related topics to encourage more in-depth reading and revive past discussions
- FAQs and Favorites forum collects the best of the best to encourage "self service" reading; the related topics automatic search takes advantage of these vetted topics to present a few (hopefully) relevant matches in each set of related topics
- Search has been highly optimized for speed and enhanced to recognize common espresso-related abbreviations and synonyms.
As you noted, friendly URLs are not only easier to read, but hopefully search engines will return higher quality results. Although we rely on the board's native search today, it won't scale over time, so I've already enabled Google Search in the site's search. If someday the board's search is too slow, it will be easy to switch and (hopefully) still get the same quality search results.
PS: For those who aren't in the web design biz, SEO = Search Engine Optimization.
by HB on Wed Feb 07, 2007 11:10 pm 
