ptg16476052Considering User Experience Level 60722
and computers.com in the past. They’re easy to remember, and you don’t have to spell
them out when you tell them to people.
You might not have control over your domain name, but you can exercise control over
the rest of your URLs. Say that you have a section of your site called “Products and
Services.” All the pages in that section are stored in their own directory. You could call it
any one of the following:
/ps
/prdsvcs
/products
/products_services
/products_and_services
There are plenty of other options, too (you could call it /massapequa if you wanted to),
but the preceding list seems like a reasonable group of options. Of the list, a few stand
out to me as being poor choices. /products_service and /products_and_services just
seem too verbose. If the pages under those directories have long names at all, you’re sud-
denly in very long URL territory, which isn’t conducive to sharing. However, /prdsvcs
may be short, but it’s also difficult to remember and almost certainly has to be spelled out
if you tell it to anyone. It’s probably no good. That leaves two remaining choices:
/ps and /products. The first, /ps, is nice and short and probably easy to remember.
Using it would be fine. However, there’s one other principle of URLs that I want to talk
about: guessability.
Chances are that most of the people who visit your website have been using the Web
for awhile. There’s some chance that they might just assume that they know where to
go on your site based on experience. If they want to read about your products, they may
guess—based on their experience with other sites they’ve visited—that your products will
be listed at http://www.your-url.com/products. Any time you can put your content where
your users will assume it to be, you’re doing them a favor. Using standard directory
names such as /about, /contact, and /products can make things ever so slightly easier
for your users at no cost to you.
Several URL shortening services are available that you can use
to help your readers when your URLs get too long. My favorite is
https://bitly.com/.TIP