In terms of Web pages, a URL is the "location" or "address" of a Web page. For example, www.ndsu.edu is the URL of the NDSU home page. Given a URL, your Web browser is able to retrieve and display content of a Web page. To identify the URL of a page you are viewing, look at the browser address bar.

Since TYPO3 generates URLs based on page titles by default, it is easy to inadvertently create URLs that are too long to include in e-mails (greater than 80 characters) or to easily read out loud to your office mates. There are solutions to shorten these URLs, however.

Note that the simplest solution is to use short page titles such as "Contact" instead of "Contact form" or "Staff" instead of "Department XYZ full-time staff list."

In the event you have a page title that is long and descriptive and you want that page's URL segment to be short (or different from the title altogether), you may set a Speaking URL path segment.

For example, the default URL segment for a page named "Knowledge Base" will be "knowledge_base"

But if you want to print/e-mail a shortened URL segment, such as "kb" you set the Speaking URL path segment to override the default URL.

1. In the Page module, right-click on the page that you would like to shorten the URL for
2. Choose
3. On the General tab, locate the Speaking URL path segment field
4. In the Speaking URL path segment field, enter a segment exactly as you would like the URL segment to exist.
   For the example above, the Speaking URL path segment should be entered as "kb"
5. Save and close the page
6. Send to review and/or publish as usual

The URL change will not take effect immediately if the page was published before a Speaking URL path segment was added or modified. To fix this, clear the branch cache.

In this case, you may have a URL that displays in your browser address bar as
"http://www.ndsu.edu/yoursite/undergraduate/policies/things_you_should_do_to_be_good"
and want to publish a URL that looks like
"http://www.ndsu.edu/yoursite/policies ."

In this case, the recommended procedure is to create a shortcut page to the actual page. The shortcut page will act as a redirect to the actual page.

1. In the Page module, right-click on the home page of your site and select New
2. In the New Record frame, choose Page > Click here for wizard!
3. Position the page at the highest level of your site possible (tree-hierarchy, not vertical position)
   
   • It is recommended that you keep all of these redirects in one area of your site, for example, the last pages in your tree, so that they are easily located and identified in the future
4. In the Page New frame, change the Type: pull-down menu to Shortcut
5. Click OK to save and refresh the page
6. Enter a Pagetitle: exactly as you would like the URL to exist. For the example above, this page should be titled "Policies"
7. In the Shortcut tab, click the button
8. In the page browser, select the page this shortcut should go to.
   For the example above, this page is "Policies/Things you should do to be good"
9. Save, close, and publish as normal