Good practice with URLs

A brief summary of the importance of paying attention to URL design, drawing on:

• a conversation with a search engine engineer
• URL’s for Information Architects - Silver Oliver again!
• Well Designed URLs are beautiful – Mike Shenkel
• Google’s advice on URL structure to webmasters

Make URLs persistent

Because:

• Other sites link to them
• People bookmark them
• Search engines index them

The core content for a URL should be reasonably static (home and hub pages excluded of course)

Make URLs readable by humans

• They’re not just in web address bar
• People can remember them if they’re well designed
• People can understands them if they’re well designed
• They are more meaningful
• If they are well constructed they benefit search engine optimisation

Make URLs hackable

• They expose a logical structure to the site
• Supports navigation:
  • Help users orientate in the site
  • Let’s people move up the hierarchy
• Helps people guess the address of similar resources on the site
• So:
  • Label consistently
  • Put similar resources at the same level
  • Provide meaningful content at each level of the hierarchy

The case for strong narratives

A former colleague, Silver Oliver, makes the case for web-scalable narratives. Music to my ears:

“As we build larger and larger websites it becomes increasingly difficult to scale meaningful user journeys.  Success is dependent on indentifying your key user journeys (narrative structures) and ensuring these can be dynamically populated as the site grows.”

He argues that, in contrast to tags which “help to open up new user journeys but are weak in narrative, taking the form ‘this content is about this tag’”; there is a need to think about the right primary narrative structures and to encode these user journeys into the very core of the site.

Oliver cites well known examples:

• Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought – noun (book) verb (also bought) noun (book)

• Buy it now – noun (user) verb (buy) noun (item)
• Such and such wrote on your Wall – noun (friend) verb (wrote on) noun (wall)

and goes on to suggest they can be scalable to the semantic web using ontologies and domain models.