Shorter URLs for your Registration pages

06 Sep 2013 By Roger Devine

This week my son started high school. And naturally, the school that he is going to uses our software to run their auction, and has for years. They printed a poster this week to let the community know that we’ll be holding an auction again this year, and try to kick-start early-bird ticket sales. On the bottom of the poster was the URL for the online-registration page for our event website for this year:

http://wilsonhighschoolpta.tofinoauctions.com/whsauction2014/register

The designer who set up the poster is fabulous, but that’s a real looooong URL to squeeze on to a poster. And looking at it, I could not imagine that anyone could possibly remember it long enough to get home and buy tickets. I was embarrassed, cause that’s kind of our fault, really.

So, I decided to do something about it. I found an article by a guy who had a quick and easy way to set up your own custom URL shortening service, and bought a short(-er) domain to use with it. An hour later, bingo! I was able to send our poster designer this link, to replace that loooong one above:

http://attendthis.org/wilsonauction

Much better. Much more memorable.

And now I have this set up, and can do the same for SchoolAuction.net, Tofino Auctions, and PartySupporters.org customers who want their own attendthis.org/ short URL. For now, it is not integrated into the application, so I have to set it up myself. But I’m happy to do this for you, so just email me and let me know.

Roger