title: Website URL Redirection
body: <p>I'm building a website/application that is used for a tennis ladder system.  If you're not sure what this is, it's basically a tournament structure where players join a ladder and are able to challenge one another to matches.  Depending on how the scoring system is set up, they move up or down the ladder in standings after submitting a match score.</p>
  
  <p>I've been building the site using PHP for server-side scripting and MySQL for the database.  Everything is coming along pretty well, but I've looked at other tennis ladder sites and noticed their URLs are much simpler looking than mine when performing actions. </p>
  
  <p>For instance, on my site when I click to view a ladder standings the url looks like:  myurl/ladders.php?ladderID=4.  However, another ladder's website URL looks like: <a href="https://tennisladders.net/ladders/188/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://tennisladders.net/ladders/188/</a></p>
  
  <p>Is this done simply by modifying the .htaccess file to redirect to that particular format?</p>
  
  <p>I've also noticed on that same website when you go to join a ladder it would use a url like this: <a href="https://tennisladders.net/ladders/join/1212/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://tennisladders.net/ladders/join/1212/</a>.  I'm wondering where a url like that might redirect to -- could it redirect to something like tennisladders.net/joinLadder.php?ladderID=1212?</p>
  
  <p>I suppose I'm just confused how they seem to use very structured URLs to achieve actions on the website, whereas I only understand how to create separate .php files and pass them the name value pairs after the .php? extension to accomplish tasks.  </p>