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.