Blog for The Well Designed URLs Initiative

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):

• Reinforce a brand message (when a good domain and/or logic URL path is used),
• Help orientate the reader (within the website’s structure, and/or regarding the offer),
• Provide text clues to the destination page’s content and value,
• Indicate important content relationships (via the URL path’s heirarchy and/or between multiple emailed URLs), and
• Remain relevant and recognisable over a long period of time (assuming the email marketer has a process in place to manager their site’s URL architecture.)

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?

1. http://www.brandk.com/land.php?123456
2. http://www.brandk.com/rings/coupon/

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:

http://www.brandk.com/rings/coupon/justformark/

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.  :-)

I got an email from the PayPal Developer Network today announcing PayPal’s new “NVP” (or “Name-Value Pair“) API. Clearly they’ve learned that the complexity of SOAP is counter productive to adoption. Here’s what the email had to say about their new API:

NVP Is Your Integration MVP
We’re proud to announce that PayPal’s Name-Value Pair API has launched. Complex SOAP structure is now gone. All API methods are supported, except for AddressVerify. Get exclusive sample code – download two SDKs (Java and .NET). Get Details

Taking a look at their examples (in .ASP, .PHP, or ColdFusion) and their SDKs (for Java and ASP.NET [v1.1]) it’s nice to see they are using POST instead of GET. The following is one of their functions from their PHP examples (CallerService.php) that illustrates how their code is calling their NVP API (I edited for line-length only):

function hash_call($methodName,$nvpStr)
{
   //declaring of global variables
   global $API_Endpoint,$version,$API_UserName,
          $API_Password,$API_Signature,$nvp_Header;

   //setting the curl parameters.
   $ch = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$API_Endpoint);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);

   //turning off the server and peer verification
   //(TrustManager Concept).
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

   //if USE_PROXY constant set to TRUE in Constants.php,
   //then only proxy will be enabled. if USE_PROXY constant
   //set to TRUE in Constants.php, then only proxy will be
   //enabled.
   //Set proxy name to PROXY_HOST and port number to
   // PROXY_PORT in constants.php
   if(USE_PROXY)
      curl_setopt ($ch,
                        CURLOPT_PROXY,
                        PROXY_HOST.”:”.PROXY_PORT);

   //NVPRequest for submitting to server
   $nvpreq= “METHOD=”.urlencode($methodName).
            “&VERSION=”.urlencode($version).
            “&PWD=”.urlencode($API_Password).
            “&USER=”.urlencode($API_UserName).
            “&SIGNATURE=”.urlencode($API_Signature).$nvpStr;

   //setting the nvpreq as POST FIELD to curl
   curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$nvpreq);

   //getting response from server
   $response = curl_exec($ch);

   //convrting NVPResponse to an Associative Array
   $nvpResArray=deformatNVP($response);
   $nvpReqArray=deformatNVP($nvpreq);
   $_SESSION[’nvpReqArray’]=$nvpReqArray;

   if (curl_errno($ch)) {
        // moving to display page to display curl errors
        $_SESSION[’curl_error_no’]=curl_errno($ch) ;
        $_SESSION[’curl_error_msg’]=curl_error($ch);
        $location = “APIError.php”;
        header(”Location: $location”);
    } else {
        //closing the curl
        curl_close($ch);
     }

return $nvpResArray;
}

Much nicer and simplier than having to go to all the effort to set up a SOAP call.

Unfortunately, PayPal missed a huge opportunity to make their new API fully RESTful. Instead of designing a URL-centric REST interface (with a hypermedia component to keep the purist or the pure RESTafarians happy) they instead tunneled method calls over HTTP!  They used methods like “DoDirectPayment” and “RefundTransaction” Sheesh! (Note: these links to their methods load slower than any website I can remember visiting in ages and while loading my browser does lots of clicking. What the heck is going on in there I have no idea! You can go to the main docs via a much faster downloading PDF here. Wow, if that isn’t usually an oxymoron!)

Though much easier than calling SOAP, clearly not very RESTful.  Three steps forward, and two steps back. Sigh…

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.

Jon Udel has a post today entitled Divergent citation-indexing paths. Funny that he wrote about this; it seems he and I are on such a parallel trajectory these days. For evidence, take a look at my post from last week I titled Lessons Learned from Delicious Praise.

In his post Jon states “Del.icio.us, unlike Bloglines, treats the URLs that you feed to its citation counter in a case-sensitive way.” I wonder if Jon is aware of the Tim Berners-Lee’s URI Opacity Axiom?  A correct reading of the URI Opacity Axiom would reveal that in that Bloglines is in the wrong and Del.icio.us is in the right in this case; i.e. URLs are case-sensitive and programs SHOULD NOT[1] infer that two URLs with different casing point to the same resource. (NOTE: case doesn’t matter with domain names but it DOES matter in URL paths.)

As a matter of fact the URI Opacity Axiom is such as a closely held belief among those I like to call “the Weborati” that if you even question it so as to understand it on certain W3C or related mailing lists you’ll be in for a firestorm as if you blasphemed the messiah! ;-0

All kidding aside, especially since some of those people who hold the URI Opacity Axiom dear read this blog (!), after spending the time to research it and really learn it I came to believe that it is a very good idea for people to follow the URI Opacity Axiom. And I’ll discuss why in the future when I have more time. Unfortunately, like many principled concepts some people have elevated the URI Opacity Axiom to the level of dogma, and many of those who preach it believe it means a distortion of what it really means.

So Jon identified a real-world problem that following the URI Opacity Axiom introduces yet it is somewhat of a “catch-22“; following the axiom creates real-world problems but not following it creates other real world problems. But longer term, I really don’t think it has to be this way, and I’m working on ideas to address this issue that may turn into draft proposals or recommendations or something else. Basically I think with some “layers” of technology added to the web we could have the best of both worlds.

As an aside, Del.icio.us could update links based upon 301 redirects and then website owners could 301 redirect to a(n ideally lowercased) canonical URL whenever their server receives a request for a URL that is not in the canonical URLs format. This assumes of course that the website owner/server operator has chosen for their URLs to effectively be case-insensitive[2].

1. I use the “SHOULD NOT” in the same way RFC 2119 defines the use of the uppercased term.  
2. In my opinion running a website with case-sensitive URLs either means the web developer just wasn’t thinking or that they don’t have a clue about the affect case-sensitive URLs have on website usability. Ah, but that’s another subject for another day. :)