4a Seed TO Attachment 3 Water_Management _Websites_Best_Practices.pdf

Last reviewed by: Diana Hanbali and Charels Graham

1 July 26, 2026

Overview In this section we will go over best practices for Water Management web development. As we work towards completing our sites, many districts have found ways to simplify and improve content on our webpages. This document is meant to capture these key lessons from the districts and serve as a living resource.

URLs This section will describe the naming convention for the Water Management URLs. There are general standards in developing URLs. This section will cover strategies for structuring URLs for clarity, incorporating relevant keywords, and ensuring consistency across the platform.

General conventions for URLs are the following:

• Use lowercase for path names

• Use hyphens for word separation

• Avoid underscores, spaces, and special characters

• Keep URLs short, clear, and descriptive

• Avoid trailing slashes

We will make exceptions for the CWMS location IDs for the above rules

Table 1 has the list of common names used in the sidebar. This will guide you on how to set up your URL after theBASE_URL, i.e. /office/mvp . If you have multiple reports or plots, you will want to use ….swf/reports/report-name.

Ensure paths preceding a report, such as ...swf/reports, provide an index page of report links. Preventing this page in the breadcrumbs from providing a 404 and ensuring users have a catalog of sorts to your reports.

Table 1: URL Naming Convention

Project Status Map /map Water Management Reports /reports Project Information /project Water Management Data /data DCP Monitor /gage or tools/gage Snow Melt /snowmelt Water Quality /water-quality Hydropower /hydropower/:name Forecasts /forecasts/:name Hydrologic Query /query or tools/query Online Forms /data-entry Contact Information /contact Water Management District Links /wm-districts Dam Safety /dam-safety About /about NWS river forecasts /river-forecasts/:name

Water Management Websites- Best Practices

2 July 26, 2026

Useful tip:

Using the variable syntax :name in a URL (e.g., /releases/:name) allows pages to be loaded dynamically. If you only have one or two pages, you have the option to hardcode the project name instead (e.g. /forecasts/town-bluff).

This approach saves time, keeps things organized, and makes it easier for districts to reuse components.

example, if KEYS is the primary ID for the project Keystone Lake in SWT, then /releases/:name would result in /releases/keys

Current Examples being used by the districts:

https://water.usace.army.mil/office/nap/map https://water.usace.army.mil/office/lrh/contact https://water.usace.army.mil/office/mvp/about https://water.usace.army.mil/office/mvp/contact

General Standards for URL Coding and Examples

1. Allowed Characters

Safe characters:

Letters (a–z)

Digits (0–9)

Hyphen (-)

Reserved characters (like /, ?, &, =, #) have special meanings in URLs and are used for queries and fragments

Unsafe characters (like spaces, <, >, {, }, ", |, \, ^, [ ,], `), we will not be using these. For special cases, it must be percent-encoded. I.e. if you have a timeseries ID or some other case where you need one of these in a URL

2. Capitalization

Paths, query strings, and fragments are often case-sensitive (depends on server). For example:

example.com/Page ≠ example.com/page on many servers.

Best practice: Use lowercase consistently for paths and filenames to avoid confusion.

Basin Information /basin/:name Dashboard Type Pages /dashboard Plot Pages /plots/:name Release Pages /releases/:name https://water.usace.army.mil/office/nap/map https://water.usace.army.mil/office/lrh/contact https://water.usace.army.mil/office/mvp/about https://water.usace.army.mil/office/mvp/contact blockedhttp://example.com/Page blockedhttp://example.com/page

3 July 26, 2026

3. Hyphens and Underscores

Hyphens (-) are the standard separator for readability and SEO. Example:

✅ example.com/my-project

❌ example.com/my_project

Search engines treat hyphens as word separators but not underscores.

4. Length and Readability

Keep URLs short, descriptive, and human-readable.

Avoid unnecessary parameters and acronyms where possible.

Example:

✅ example.com/solar-installation-guide

❌ example.com/page.php?id=1234&ref=5678

5. Trailing Slash example.com/folder/ and example.com/folder can be treated differently depending on the server.

Best practice: Be consistent; usually, omit the trailing slash unless referring to a directory.

blockedhttp://example.com/my-article blockedhttp://example.com/my_article blockedhttp://example.com/solar-installation-guide blockedhttp://example.com/page.php?id=1234&ref=5678 blockedhttp://example.com/folder/ blockedhttp://example.com/folder