creative briefing

One aspect of branding your URL, or anything for that matter, is to make it as easy to remember as possible (recall Part 1’s branding discussion). A long and complicated sentence will never fly as a company’s tagline because nobody would ever remember it. If nobody remembers it, the value is lost. Likewise, a long and complicated URL makes it difficult for your visitors to remember it, and inevitably, it makes it difficult for them to access the content they’re looking for quickly. Not only that, but it looks ugly in a browser’s address bar.

For site publishers/owners looking to take an extra step in branding their website, here’s the second installment of how to brand your website’s URL, this time using friendly URL structures.

For the most part, visitors of your website will arrive using your root domain name (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com). As they navigate through various pages of your site, the URL will naturally become longer (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/about/index.html). How you structure the string that follows your root domain name is another key aspect of branding your URL, and there are three reasons why you should consider making this structure as friendly as possible:

1. Your visitors may want to access specific sections of your site directly, rather than have to navigate through your home page. A friendly URL structure will help them remember the URL for the specific area of your site that interests them.
2. There is no pleasure in typing a URL. Why not attempt to improve the experience by keeping it as friendly as possible?
3. For the aesthetically picky site owner, a friendly URL structure just looks cleaner.

So what’s a friendly URL?

The term ‘friendly URL’ came up during the time I spent working for Microsoft Canada. At MS, a ‘friendly URL’ referred to a shortened URL that would point to a longer URL. Mostly used for campaigns, friendly URLs would typically look like: www.yourwebsite.com/buynow, where ‘buynow’ would be a short phrase or keyword that was easier to remember than the full URL (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/widgets/promotions/buynow/index.html).

This concept can be applied it to the entire structure of your URL (the domain name + the string of subdiretories/pages that come after it). Whether or not you have crazy long URLs, there is still room to make it fairly clean and friendly (and more aesthetically pleasing).

So what’s an unfriendly URL?

An unfriendly URL will commonly come in four forms:

1. The query string
   www.yourwebsite.com/index.php?id=123&cid=8727&ugly=true&complicated=true&friendly=false
2. The flat structure
   www.yourwebsite.com/widgetA.html
3. The really, really, really long structure
   www.yourwebsite.com/a_really_really_really_long_url_structure/
4. The mixed case structure
   www.YourWebsite.com/GuesswhichWordsActuallyStartwithaCapitalLetter

These are all pretty self explanatory, with the exception of the second one. A flat URL structure refers to those that place every single page in the same directory, ignoring the use of subdirectories to better organize/classify/group similar content. This is considered unfriendly as it doesn’t appeal to humans’ innate tendency to classify information they come across.

So how do I ensure that my URL structure is friendly?

Follow these 4 friendly pieces of advice:

1. Make it intuitive.
   As adept to the internet the population is growing to be, it is still nearly impossible for anybody to memorize a URL if it simply doesn’t make sense to them. Not to say that everybody makes attempts to memorize full URLs, but we’ve all been in the situation where we’ve tried to guess a URL to a specific page simply because we’re reluctant to find it through the homepage. Now try guessing a URL that contains a query string like the one demonstrated above. Probably not that fun. As such, make your URL intuitive by using keywords that your visitors would use to label your content. In other words, don’t use www.yourwebsite.com/widgets if your visitors know your product as “tools” (you should use www.yourwebsite.com/tools instead).
    
   How exactly you can go about converting your query-stringed URL into a friendlier URL is beyond the scope of this post (and my expertise). However, for the technically curious, you can read about how it can be done here.
    
2. Make it hierarchical.
   Most people can wrap their heads around information better if it’s nicely categorized and grouped by similar topics. So be nice and organize your pages into hierarchies that can be clearly seen in the URL. For example, rather than www.yourwebsite.com/widgetA.html, try using www.yourwebsite.com/products/widgetA.html. Since widget A is known to be a product, your visitors will have an easier time memorizing the URL that leads directly to their Widget A haven. Even in the case that they forget, it’s still a whole lot easier to guess. And as an added bonus to you the site publisher, using hierarchies will also help you better manage your files on the server.
    
3. Make it short.
   A short URL is a friendly URL, so long as it still satisfies the above conditions. It’s that simple. Your visitors don’t want to be typing in a query string any more than they want to be typing in a novel. Granted, this blog doesn’t have the shortest URLs (my permalinks are just setup to convert my article titles into URLs), but it was my best alternative (in the realm of what’s possible within WordPress) to keep things straight forward, intuitive and optimized for search engines.
    
4. Make it lowercase.
   For the best results, your site should be setup to handle both uppercase URLs and lowercase URLs (or a combination of both). But in the case that it doesn’t, you should aim to have all your URLs in lowercase. There are a great deal of uppercasing conventions, and forcing your visitors to guess which one you’re following would simply be mean and unfriendly.

A big part of one’s brand is the experience that results from interacting with it. Managing your brand wisely is about ensuring that that experience is a positive one. In some cases, it’s just a matter of making it a bit friendlier!

What annoys you most about URLs?

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Part 1: to www or not to www?
Part 3: coming soon!