ptg16476052608 LESSON 22: Designing for User Experience
My final bit of advice on URLs is to make sure that they reflect the structure of your
site. One time, I worked on a site that consisted of hundreds of files, all in a single direc-
tory. The site itself had structure, but the files were not organized based on that structure.
Whether the user was on the home page or five levels deep within the site, the URL was
still just a filename tagged onto the hostname of the server. Not only did this make the
site hard to work on, but it also kept some useful information away from users.
Suppose you have a site about cars, and you want users to get the latest information about
the Honda Fit. What’s more useful to your users?
http://www.example.com/fit.html
or
http://www.example.com/cars/honda/2016/fit.html
The second URL provides a lot more information to the user than the first one does. As
an added bonus, you can set up your site so that the user can take fit.html off the end
and get a list of all Honda models for 2016. He can also remove 2016/fit.html to dis-
play all the Honda model years your site covers or take honda/2016/fit.html off the
end and get a list of all car makes discussed on the site. This URL would be very useful
to someone with a lot of experience on the Web.
While veteran web users are accustomed to dealing with URLs, newcomers might not be
as comfortable with a long, complicated URL. One way to solve this is to set up redirects
on your web server to make shorter URLs point to their longer, more fleshed-out destina-
tions. In other words, you could make http://www.example.com/fit.html point to http://
http://www.example.com/cars/honda/2016/fit.html. Most web hosting services offer redirection
help. Contact their support if you don’t know how to do it on your website.Navigation Provides Context
The key purpose of navigation is obviously to enable your users to get from one place
to another within your site. However, its secondary purpose is to let your users know
where they are within the site. This is something that “breadcrumb” navigation provides
to users—a sense of location. Take a look at the screenshot from the DMOZ directory in
Figure 22.1.
Just below the search box, you can see a list of links that start at the top of the directory
and lead down to the page that I’m actually on. The first thing it does is give me the abil-
ity to go back to any level of the directory between the home page (called “Top”) and the
Cats page that I’m actually on. The second thing it does is let me know that I’m six levels
into the directory; the page I’m on is part of the Shopping category of the directory and
all the subcategories between that category and the page that I’m on. That’s a lot of util-
ity packed into a small feature.