There is a kind of beauty in a good URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or web address). The nameofsite.com part is important, but once you’ve decided on that, there’s more. Picking a good directory structure and naming convention makes a URL shareable and easy.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of examples of bad URLs. They are long and mean nothing to humans. For example, here is a very basic Amazon.com link (1):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00023J4H0/duvinci-20/
As soon as you click on it, Amazon adds yet another bit of meaningless garbage–a session identifier, something like 103-4016647-1367485.
It’s very easy for we programmers to start slapping /info.php?name=adam&game=coding stuff onto our URLs. This is the way that our programs accept data, so it has become second nature and we are used to seeing it. Wouldn’t our users rather see info/adam/coding/ … ? (2)
I use URL rewriting to provide web addresses that are short, memorable, and easy to share. Apache’s mod_rewrite does the trick on Unix-like systems and ISAPI_Rewrite is your IIS variant.
A List Apart does a good job of walking the walk with their directory structure, as well as giving a great introduction to URL rewriting.
* A few notes: 1. Amazon is actually doing some rewriting to get the URL I mentioned, but my point is that shorter and less numeric would still be better. 2. I sometimes question whether your average surfer even knows how to find their current location.
Agreed. The need for Good URLs was part of the impetus behind Glenn Fleishman’s isbn.nu, where the URL is simply the ISBN number of the book, something I mentioned over here.
A related point: some URLs never change, which is just as bad as the inscrutable-crap-laden ones.