Taking life philosophically.
7 January 2010
When I started this site in 2004, I wanted to do everything the right way. I wanted to make all the right decisions on basic site design. It was important to me not to make big mistakes that would cause problems later. I preferred (and still do) minimalistic but flexible solutions to more fancy but potentially problematic ones.
One of the things that I realized almost immediately was how important it is to design the structure of the site well, down to the addresses of each page—or to be more precise, the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) of each page. There are many reasons for this.
The main reason is that if you have to change the address of a page later, all the old links to the old address stop working. Also, at least for a moment, the page becomes more difficult to find, because the search engines have not indexed its new address yet. If you design the address well, you are much less likely to have to change it later. Tim Berners-Lee’s article has more details.
Also, as Jakob Nielsen writes, it matters how the URI looks. It is a good idea to have addresses that you can easily say. This means that they have to consist of simple words and punctuation. They should not have arbitrary combinations of letters and numbers. An example:
Try it out loud. Which one of these two is easier to say and remember?
Finally, and related to the last point, a good URI is short. However, it is a common practice to make the title of the page a part of the address. This practice leads to addresses that may be easy to say but too long to remember or write down. This has brought about the necessary evil of URI shortening services. These are particularly popular among the users of Twitter, because if you only have 140 characters for your message, you cannot use too many of them just for the link. Such services do work, but they do cause problems too, and it would be preferable not to have to use them.
I have been very happy with the URI design choices I have made. So far I have not had to change anything, apart a few things right in the beginning. If you are designing a web application or a website, it makes sense to plan ahead even when you are dealing with small details. It will save you a lot of trouble later.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.