TODO:
Have you ever wanted to change the location of your Application Pages from _Layouts to a directory that is more meaningful to your application?
SOLUTIONS:
1. Open IIS Manager and go to your Sharepoint site.
2. Create a new virtual directory at the same level as _layouts (for example 'MyDirectoryName')
3. Point the new virtual directory to the same physical path as your _layouts virtual directory. (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\template\layouts)
4. Now open your application page, changing _layouts to MyDirectoryName.
5. Now you have a more meaningful URL to use for your application pages.
NOTES:
What is nice about this solution, is that you do not need to do anything special during deployment.