Unused parent page, what to do?

[rooofl]

I have made several websites with this kind of structure:

• home
  • projects
    • project1
    • project2
    • project3

In my cases, the home page lists all projects, so the home/projects/ page is a double of home’s function. What would be the best practice?

• create a list of projects specially for projects/ even if it does the same as home/
• redirect projects/ to home/ (I found ProcessRedirects can’t do that as the page is already exists, but maybe I can force it with .htaccess?)
• something else?

Thank you for your advice.

[Ivan Gretsky]

Hi @rooofl! What are your goals? Is SEO a conсern? Best practices should always help achieve a goal.

Anyway, let me add some options to go under "something else":

1. Create a template for projects and out put nothing there but a link to the main page. Optionally restrict its indexing. Make sure no links point to that page (take care of breadcrumbs if you have them). This way noone but freaks who like to modify the url bar in the browser will ever get there.
2. Same as 1 but add a redirect. You could put it in the template file for projects with something like this. Maybe with 303 or 307 code.
3. If you really care about the beauty of the urls, could make use of url segments and make your project pages be accessible as home/project1. But that would require some work.
4. You could put something useful on the projects page' Like a search box.

[rooofl]

Thank you @Ivan Gretsky! Your ideas are what I was looking for.

My goals are more for a user navigation perspective than SEO. Until now, this page can be reached only by modifying URL bar, but my clients do that apparently! (I do too sometimes).

I think 2. is the best option for my case. Thank you again!

[Christophe]

There are also the new URL/path hooks:
https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.173/