“Given that social filtering is one of the most powerful mechanisms for information discovery on the Internet, it is an utter disaster to disable the URL as an addressing mechanism. “
I’ve long believed email provides one of the better justifications for good URL design. Having a well designed URL structure inspires a user to have faith in a site’s URL integrity making it more likely then will email a URL to their friends. What’s more, a good URL gives hints to what can be found making it more likely for an email recipients to visit the link. And a readable URL provides something to “google” when the emailed URL is mangled or simply mistyped by the sender.
But it simply hadn’t occurred to me just how important URL design can be for marketing emails until today when I read a post today by Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports. Mark’s post, entitled Forget email design, what about URL design? discusses the immediately obvious benefits of URL design in email marketing and lists several reasons why email marketers should pay particular attention to their URLs.
As Mark effectively states, well designed URLs can (elaborations mine):
In addition Mark also gives a few examples that clearly make the case for good URL design in email marketing. He effectively asks which of these two URLs send a stronger message to the prospect?
I think the preferrable one is obvious, don’t you?
Mark also suggests providing your prospect with their own custom call-to-action URL in marketing emails such as:
I too believe that providing customers with their own personal well designed URL can be an incredibly powerful marketing and SEO strategy. However, I’m not so sure it will work well for unknown prospects.
Well done Mark. Nice to have another URLian on the bandwagon. :-)
“Wikipedia’s URL spaces are highly elegant; I suspect it’s one of the reason’s Wikipdedia is successful”
“…one should take an hour or so and really think about their website’s ‘public face.’”
“A URL is like a big “YOU ARE HERE” sign for each page of your site. It should allow people to get a sense of where they are in your site, even if they decide not to use that information for navigation.”
Another URLian has appeared: Brad Fults. Brad just added himself to our wiki and became a signatory; thanks Brad! Better yet, on his user page on our wiki he linked to his post Designing URLs for Multilingual Web Sites; execellent job Brad!
That was a subject I’ve been planning to write for a while, and I’ll probably cover the issue in the future to here on the WDUI Blog to future the conversation but I doubt I could have done as good a job as Brad for my first post on the subject.
One option he did not cover was using using language in filenames, such as #1 - an extention:
example.com/bar/baz.en-US
example.com/bar/baz.en-GB
example.com/bar/baz.de
Or a #2 - suffix to an extension (note I had to add an .html extension for this option):
example.com/bar/baz.html.en-US
example.com/bar/baz.html.en-GB
example.com/bar/baz.html.de
Or as an #3 - extension prefix (also needed an .html extension):
example.com/bar/baz.en-US.html
example.com/bar/baz.en-GB.html
example.com/bar/baz.de.html
Or as an #4 - filename prefix:
example.com/bar/en-US.baz
example.com/bar/en-GB.baz
example.com/bar/de.baz
Or #5 - one level up in the path:
example.com/bar/en-US/baz
example.com/bar/en-GB/baz
example.com/bar/de/baz
Unlike Brad, I didn’t provide an evaluation of these simply because I haven’t researched the subject enough at this time. Maybe he can do a follow up post providing an evaluation of each of these.
However, I can say I don’t really like any of these options, nor are any of the options Brad provides sit well with me except possibly his “Modified Directory Structure (#2)” combined in creative ways with his “Use of Accept-Language HTTP Header (#6)” the latter a.k.a. Content Negotiation. Whatever the case, there will be more on this subject in the future, I’m sure, and it’s good to have this discussion taking place.
In the hustle and bustle of these holidays, I didn’t manage to churn out all of my planned posts for our introduction series. So with nothing else to publish today it seems only fitting I introduce you to the works of someone I met recently. His name is Ben Coffey and he’s an absolutely brillant kid[1] from the U.K. who shares my passion for User-Centric User Design.
His work that I spoke of is his ebook entitled “Useful URLs” It is available for download at his website inelegant.org in both HTML and PDF formats. Further kudos to Ben for he licensed Useful URLs using a Creative Commons “by-nc-sa“ license meaning you’re free to copy and distribute it as long as you attribute him as author, you don’t use for commercial purposes, and you share any of your own modifications or additions with the same license. Ben says that Useful URLs is a work-in-progress so he plans on updating it continuously. I’ll be sure to make mention here when he updates it, especially if he adds new chapters.
That said, Useful URLs is both a quick read and also:
Highly Recommended!