Drupal's standard URLs are far from pretty. They suck.
First off, who's going to remember http://www.example.com/node/12762 over http://www.example.com/about-us.html? It's just not user-friendly. You kinda have to take a gamble each time you want to link to something in your own web site. And chicks don't dig it ;)
Then, you have the search engines. Non-descriptive URLs do nothing for your ranking. Sure, you should have good titles that clearly describe what each page is about but if you were pitted against another, similar page (and you always are) , if that page had a descriptive URL, you'd lose.
Enter Drupal's path module. It allows you to specify what URL your new content should be found by. The sucky part to that is if you're running a big site (like www.freearticles.co.za), you still have a lot of manual work ahead of you.
Even for blogs (like this one), it's a pain in the butt to have to type out your URLs each time.
Enter Drupal's contributed pathauto module. It turns a title like "How to Fry a Cat" into a URL like "how-to-fry-cat.html". Pretty nifty here?
Here's how to configure pathauto to make your web site more user-friendly
First off, it's commonly accepted (though hardly guaranteed) that Google likes pages that end in ".html". I doubt that's the truth but it sure does look pretty. Kind of gives me a nostalgic feeling when I see URLs that still have the "html" extension, so let's do that :)
Once you've installed and activated pathauto, go to the pathauto module's settings page and, under "Node path settings", just add ".html" after "[title]" so you end up with "[title].html".
If you have existing nodes, remember to check the box labeled, "Bulk update node paths". This will fix all of your existing pages to use pretty URLs, too.
Pretty much the same can be done for the "Blog path settings", and "User path settings". You can leave "General settings" and "Category path settings" as they are.
The most important part of all of this is to ensure that you have "Clean URLs" enabled in your Drupal setup. Without that, pathauto won't be as effective as it could be and you'll still have pretty ugly URLs :P
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Chris Luckhardt is a Canadian web media specialist, working in industry since the late 1990s. Over the course of his career in Canada, Chris has worked with countless technologies, equally splitting his time between the worlds of design and development.
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