After getting some really helpful advice concerning my own website, I thought it might be useful to pass on recommendations for people who run websites and who might not have heard them elsewhere. This is one that I think is wonderful – but it might be that I’m the only person in the world who didn’t know about it. On the off-chance that there are others out there who haven’t heard about it yet, here goes:

You know those annoying URLs that go on for about a fortnight and are full of numbers, ampersands, equals signs and question marks? (For instance, the one I came across which caused the problem was a link to a Formula 1 article - http://www.itv-f1.com/Feature.aspx?&Type=General&PO_ID=30328. Not only are they a nightmare if you’re trying to do a link on your own website but, in my case, for some strange reason my site won’t accept ampersands and kept wiping out all the text I’d typed after ‘Type=General’.

There’s a fabulous site at http://tinyurl.com which is free and doesn’t require registration. All you need to do is cut and paste the long URL into a box, and it turns the URL into a much shorter URL which, they claim, will never expire. The URL I gave above was converted to http://tinyurl.com/3cwok and works a treat!