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