Simon Willison’s Weblog

URLs matter

8th November 2002

Jeremy Zawodny talks about URLs, and describes a recent internal Yahoo discussion over how the URLs for their stock tickers should work. His points in favour of short, simple URLs are particularly worth noting:

• Short URLs mail better. They don’t wrap and break.
• Short URLs are easy to read over the phone.
• Short URLs can be memorized when used often enough.
• Guessable URLs keep the hackers and geeks happy without affecting the 99.9% of normal users at all.

With benefits like that, I just don’t understand why so many sites (especially those running a CMS costing hundreds of thousands of pounds) continue to use hideously long and illogical URLs.