Website addresses can be rather long. Length can be a problem when you're listing your web page information in a limited space.

Let's say you are sharing information about your website on twitter. When you tweet, you can only use up to 140 characters. With a long website address that doesn't leave you much room to say anything about your page!

That's why there are handy tools called url shorteners. These free resources allow you to translate a long url into a much shorter one. Two of the most common link shortening sites are bitly and ow.ly.

Here's how they work. Let's say I want a shorter equivalent of my website address, http://peakmarketingcommunications.com. If I go to Ow.ly, I enter my website address in the box, answer a question and it returns a shortened website url. The same is true of Bit.ly.

Here are my results:

Original address: http://peakmarketingcommunications.com

Ow.ly version: http://ow.ly/KL90a

Bitly version: http://bit.ly/1EPwm4p

It's that simple. The links generated aren't easy to remember, but they are real space savers.