URLs

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes



Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, 3/21/99


The URL will continue to be part of the Web user interface for
several more years, so a usable site requires: 

...a domain name that is easy to remember and easy to spell 

...short URLs 

...easy-to-type URLs 

...URLs that visualize the site structure 

...URLs that are "hackable" to allow users to move to higher levels
of the information architecture by hacking off the end of the URL

...persistent URLs that don't change 

In principle, users should not need to know about URLs which are a
machine-level addressing scheme. In practice, users often go to
websites or individual pages through mechanisms that involve exposure
to raw URLs: 

...people guess the domain name of sites they have not visited
before: if possible, secure the name of your company and main brands
as domain names 

...even when people have been to a site before, they will often try
to guess or remember the site name instead of using a bookmark or
history list: have memorable domain names that are easy to spell 

...the social interface to the Web relies on email when users want
to recommend Web pages to each other, and email is the second-most
common way users get to new sites (search engines being the most
common): make sure that all URLs on your site are less than 78
characters long so that they will not wrap across a line feed 

...shorter URLs are better since people often type them manually 

...do not use MiXeD case text in URLs since people can't remember the
difference between upper-case and lower-case characters:
all-lowercase URLs are usually preferred (domain names are less of a
problem since they are case-insensitive - usability would increase if
webservers would ignore case in resolving URLs) 

...use a spelling-checking webserver to minimize the damage caused by
the inevitable typos 

Persistent URLs Attract Links

Links from other websites are the third-most common way people find
sites (after search engines and email recommendations), so build
your site to make it easy to attract inbound links: 

Linkrot equals lost business: make sure all URLs live forever and
continue to point to relevant pages. 

Do not move pages around but keep them at the same URL: it is very
annoying for authors of other sites when their links either stop
working or turn into pointers to something different because the
original page has been moved and replaced by something new. There can
be reasons to reserve a special URL for the current edition of a
column or other special content, but the article should be stored at
a permanent URL from the start and this URL should be listed on the
page that is accessed through the temporary or varying URL. 

Should Domains End in .com?

The most frequently asked question on my recent lecture tour to
Iceland was whether it is better to get a domain ending in .com or
to use the country's own domain (.is). 

Unfortunately, many users have been trained to view ".com" as the
standard ending for commercial websites: this is an artifact of the
early American dominance on the Web and of the completion algorithm
in several popular browsers which automatically add .com to any name.
Because of this situation, my advice is: 

...for a site that uses English and is clearly world-wide in its 
appeal and user base: get a .com domain 

...for a site that uses any other language: use the appropriate 
country domain ending 

...for a site that has mainly local appeal, covers mainly local 
issues, or sells mainly local products: use the country domain, no 
matter what language is used on the site 

I recommend use of the local domain for local sites because it is
misleading to use the "international" domain ending .com for such
sites. As ecommerce and other uses of the Web grow around the world,
people will start to expect local domains for local sites and they
will not think to type .com for local service. Since the ability to
provide great local service is a major selling point, sites are
better off by staying with their own country's domain name unless
they deliberately want to be seen as disembodied cyberspace entities.

Domain Names May Die

It is likely that domain names only have 3-5 years left as a major
way of finding sites on the Web. In the long term, it is not
appropriate to require unique words to identify every single entity
in the world. That's not how human language works. 

The proposals to open up new top-level domains like .shop are a poor
solution from a usability perspective since there is no easy way to
remember which domain ending is associated with which site. The only
new TLD that's useful is .sex which would allow very simple ways of
filtering content that's undesired (or desired, as the case may be).

New addressing schemes are likely to be introduced with better
support for ambiguity and the ability to find things without knowing
the exact spelling. Search engines and directories are an early
attempt, but we can surely do better. 

Because of the conservatism of Web users, we will have to cater to
old browsers, old software, and old habits for many years, so good
domain names will continue to be important for many years. The
remaining useful life of a domain name may be as much as ten years. 





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