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User-Centered URL Design

Posted by timothy on from the think-people-think dept.

Adaptive Path has this interesting essay by Jesse James Garrett on user friendly URL design. When websites were just static files, they were often named in a friendly way, just to make it easier for the designer. But today, many dynamic web sites and CMS's are based around extremely long and complicated URLs that are difficult to work with (ever try to read one to someone over the phone?). This essay explores the way some websites use redirects and smart naming schemes to keep URL's easy and friendly.

2 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Brent Simmons' Law of CMS URLs by cpeterso · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Brent Simmons' Law of CMS URLs:

    The more expensive the Content Management System, the crappier the URLs. Compare, for instance, StoryServer's weird comma-delimited numeric URLs to Radio UserLand's human-readable (and guessable) URLs. Then compare the prices--orders of magnitudes of difference. So, at least in this respect, there's an inverse relationship between price and quality.

    --
    cpeterso
  2. An earlier article by skware · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I read a better article quite some time ago by Tim Berners Lee, entitled Cool URIs don't change, in which he discusses the designing urls properly ie. what to leave out of a url (things like .cgi, cgiexec, access details - members / non ...). The things he suggests are easily implementable in .htaccess for apache using mod_rewrite for php / cgi things.