Blog for The Well Designed URLs Initiative

For our web applications — our website, wiki, blog, and future forums — we chose to segment each by sub-domain; “wiki.”, “blog.”, and “forums.”, respectively. Rather than having subdirectories underneath the root of our www domain such as “/wiki/”, “/blog/”, and “/forums/”, we chose to use sub-domains to allow flexibility and maybe even scalability in the future.

Having the each application on a domain that is different from the blog and forums mean we can host on different machines and at different locations, as appropriate. However as I write this I realize that this rationale violates probably one of the most important best practices for URL Design; don’t allow your backend implementation dictate your URL structure!

It also means our URLs will be by 4 characters shorter[1] and since we chose a long domain name, that’s important. Still, there are pros and cons to both approaches and my gut tells me we’ll uncover further considerations as we continue researching this topic.

Related to this topic, we’ll discuss the URL Structure patterns for websites, wikis, blogs, forums, and other web apps in future posts.

1. Assuming we were to continue using “www.” as a sub-domain for our main site, which itself is another topic for us to address in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Introduction, Everyone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.