inluminent

Noel Jackson wrote a good piece about URL syntax, that I think every budding web architect should read.

As the saying goes in the field of real estate - Location, location, location. In the web development business the same applies, except location isn’t the only thing you need to pay close attention to. Location however, is key to creating a highly navigable and user-friendly site.

I’d also point out to you dear readers, that Keith Devens has documented his struggle with a smart URL schema pretty well on his weblog and in his Wiki.

Next, you should head over to Simon Wilson’s weblog for these posts: URI Design Resources, Smart Scripted URLs, Sensible URLs with PHP, and URLs matter, which will point you to Jeremy Zawodny’s post URLs matter, alot.

Jon Udell’s Web namespace design: de facto standards is a good quick read on the subject, as is the discussion over at webword.

And never forget Brent’s Law of CMS URLs:

The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs.

And lastly, URLs as UI, from Jakob Nielsen gives these basic guidelines:

• a domain name that is easy to remember and easy to spell
• short URLs
• easy-to-type URLs
• URLs that visualize the site structure
• URLs that are “hackable” to allow users to move to higher levels of the information architecture by hacking off the end of the URL
• persistent URLs that don’t change

In principle, users should not need to know about URLs which are a machine-level addressing scheme. In practice, users often go to websites or individual pages through mechanisms that involve exposure to raw URLs:

• people guess the domain name of sites they have not visited before: if possible, secure the name of your company and main brands as domain names
• even when people have been to a site before, they will often try to guess or remember the site name instead of using a bookmark or history list: have memorable domain names that are easy to spell
• the social interface to the Web relies on email when users want to recommend Web pages to each other, and email is the second-most common way users get to new sites (search engines being the most common): make sure that all URLs on your site are less than 78 characters long so that they will not wrap across a line feed
• shorter URLs are better since people often type them manually
• do not use MiXeD case text in URLs since people can’t remember the difference between upper-case and lower-case characters: all-lowercase URLs are usually preferred (domain names are less of a problem since they are case-insensitive - usability would increase if webservers would ignore case in resolving URLs)
• use a spelling-checking webserver to minimize the damage caused by the inevitable typos

All of this is of great interest to me because my own company’s URL schemes make absolutely no sense to me, and no one in the content development side of our business can give me a real reason for why our URLs are so stupid.