URLs that suck
Over at the Well Designed URLs Blog they’ve started a movement to tag all urls-that-suck on del.icio.us and they will later rank the top ten sites with utterly rubbish URLs. I think this is a great idea and will be adding my own as I come across them.
Since my recent struggle with Joomla! Pretty URLs I have been wondering whether it was really worth the effort. Suffice it to say that I am now convinced.
You can see how I’m getting on at del.icio.us/lornajane/urls-that-suck. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I did find one that had loads of commas in the article URL. I can’t find it now that I’ve run CCleaner on my PC.
Was it a cwjobs entry by any chance? They’re really bad offenders!
Bit like the ones on http://guardian.co.uk – but with about twenty commas. Guess this one runs on Apple servers?
One of my biggest offenders for ugly URLs would have to be Amazon.
LornaJane: Thanks for linking to this! I do hope we can raise aware of URLs as an important element of user interface design!
Mike, thanks for your comment! I was interested in your post as I do feel that URLs should be “friendly”. I know the theory is that they should be “search engine friendly” but I feel that “people friendly” is also important for URLs. So many sites have managed to implement this I think its a great campaign to highlight those that haven’t made the effort!
Absolutely! SEO is for opportunists, but the web is about people! Optimize for people and long term you can’t go wrong.
~Five years from now search engines won’t be nearly as important — blogs, tagging, social networks, digg-like services and more that I don’t yet know about will make give users new ways to deal with information beyond the search enginees. URLs help people connect to content, and good URLs help people who do the connecting.
Web publishers choosing to optimize their URLs for people is one of the smartest things theyh can do today, and especially for the future.