Keeping URL the same throughout the site

[SimonTuffGuy]

I want to keep my main site URL the same throughout my entire site, instead of showing the specific pages...

IE: www.mysite.com instead of www.mysite.com/page1.htm or www.mysite.com/gallery/this.php

Is there a way to do this without using frames?

Thank you!
Simon

[pageoneresults]

Hello Simon. Would you care to share with us why you would want to do that?

[tedster]

For a small number of "pages" you could use use a dhtml show/hide divs and make each "page" a separate div - actually part of your index. Would rapidly make for too big a file if the site has any substance.

I'm with pageoneresults - why would you want to hide this information when it's a standard part of web browsing, allows visitors to bookmark certain pages, link to certain pages, etc? There may be a more user-friendly way of achieving your purposes.

[edited by: tedster at 10:34 pm (utc) on Dec. 31, 2004]

[keyplyr]

You could use a redirection service like cjb.net, and then just use their subdomain as your site address. If I remember correctly, they have a URL cloaking feature, and I think they are free. Of course then you are reliant upon them.

But as the others have said, I wouldn't recommend doing this.

[rocknbil]

I want to keep my main site URL the same throughout my entire site, instead of showing the specific pages...

I just revised a site like this, where they'd set it up with a 1-pixel frameset at the top and additionally disabled all right-clicks - this is positively the most annoying thing you can do to a site next to flooding it with pop-ups. In this case, it was done to protect the source code (all of which, by the way, was STOLEN from various free sites anyway.)

Also agree, Very Bad Idea.

[keyplyr]

Just thought of something. You can use frames to mask your address bar so it always shows www.yourdomain.com when viewing your pages. Use the frameset below in your default page. In this example, the frameset will load index.html and start your site from there. But the address bar will stay showing www.yourdomain.com.

Note that most search engines will not crawl your site if you use this technique.

<frameset rows="*">
<frame src="index.html">
</frameset>

[mikec]

Note that most search engines will not crawl your site if you use this technique.

not necessarilly true. simply place the contents of your index.html file in the noframes tags.

[lammert]

You can place the content of the index.html in your noframes section, but then the search engines will only index that content, so to make the rest of the site accesible by the search engines you need to add links to these pages from the noframes section.

However, if you add links to the other pages in your noframes section, these pages get indexed under their original filename, so every user entering through a search engine will see the filenames anyway.

W3C has made a recommendation to use no file extensions for your web files. This might be something to consider. You won't see mysite.com/gallery/this.php, but mysite.com/gallery/this.

If you don't want to use file extensions, you need a hosting provider which supports this, for example with rewrite rules in the .htaccess file for an Apache server.

[TheDoctor]

If you have links to other pages in your noframes section, then your site will be usable by browsers that don't handle frames. Of course, a user of such a browser would be able to see the URLs of the other pages...

[mikec]

exactly, and the spider will follow all the links in the noframes.