Hot answers tagged urls
128
The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications is quoted by Business Writing as suggesting:
Restructure the sentence so that the address is not at the end of
the sentence.
Set off the address, like this, with no period (full stop):
Please visit my website at:
www.syntaxtraining.com
However the same site also ...
41
It is not only a problem with copy/paste. If Thunderbird (among others) receives a plain text message with an URL, it will transform it to a clickable URL, including the end period, as it is valid in an URL. A number of other punctuation characters are also legal, so care must be used.
Tradition in such plain text messages is to surround the URL with < ...
33
Let them change their name. A woman getting married takes the last name of her husband (sometimes), and not allowing her to change her name at a website could translate into a poor experience for her.
I'm a big fan of option #1. I had to go look up my ID# here at the UX website to find I'm #5737. Out of sight, out of mind, in a good way. I don't know ...
24
If you're looking for the most SEO friendly URLs that are also human readable, then I would recommend using all lowercase, hyphenated URLs, as that is what Google recommends in their Webmaster tools documentation. However, if SEO doesn't matter for your web app (if, for instance, it all lives behind a login requirement), then you can use whatever ...
21
I don't have much in the way of hard data to back this up, but a number of sites which host user-generated links (eg. news aggregators, Wikipedia) specifically ban shortened URLs for trust reasons. Joshua Schachter (creator of Delicious) wrote a blog post explaining some of the issues with them.
18
Firstly this is really just an extension of an inherent problem with links in the first place, which is that the target doesn't need to have anything to do with the link text - even if the link text looks perfectly adequate. In fact I would suggest that a well written text link is even more likely to engage and fool the user than a shortened link which might ...
16
In this specific example, the period is not really necessary. What follows the full colon need not always be a word/ phrase or some linguistic construct. It could even be an icon/ image etc.
In general though, it is always preferable to place the link either inside the sentence or behind a part of text.
Please follow the link ...
14
A solution to this some services have used is to have a separate username and display name. Your user name is your portal to the site; what you login as, what your URL is based on (usually), and sometimes how people find you.
Twitter is probably the most relevant solution, as they have good SEO but they do have a display name you can change. You can't ...
13
I just thought of an option 3, which comes in a few parts. I'm probably being excessively verbose, but I want to make sure I've covered every case :)
Only allow name changes every so often (three months should be fine to accommodate real name changes like the Jane Smith/Jane Doe examples above).
Maintain a columns in the database of the past, say... four ...
12
It is very important (it is also very good for seo).
User friendly urls help a user understand where he/she is on your site just by glancing at the address bar.
Another very important point about friendly urls are that they should be hackable. This means that a url like
blogname.com/posts/sports/baseball/2010/08/17/your-post-title
should show all the ...
12
A quite common pattern for showing all of something is to extend the category with a filter, which in your case would be something like:
http://mydomain.com/factories/all
That way you can use the filter in your URL to select factories in let's say Europe:
http://mydomain.com/factories/europe
And moving down the list to a single factory, such as:
...
11
If you really care about UX, so you have to validate URL automatically.
So if user types "example.com" you have to change it to "http://example.com".
If you want to add ability to navigate to url, that is just typed, so just underline it and make it blue; user will understand, that this is a link.
download bmml source – Wireframes created with ...
11
Yes, there are a few considerations for domain names:
Is the name memorable? Could your domain name be confused with another address, such as goggle.com vs. google.com?
Is the name easy to relay? Can you tell another person the name by saying something like "penny-dash-arcade-dot-com"?
Is the name accurate to your brand? If your site is "Cheap Pens Now", ...
10
It's an extremely contentious issue whether "user" is a bad word or not. If you want to maintain any clarity I would strongly advise against calling all people in all situations 'people.' You can't get any less specific and unhelpful than that. As long as there is a distinction between people that user or have access to your service and people in general ...
10
I always go with alloneword unless:
The words within the url
start and finish with the same later
e.g. business-shop.com
Or if the non-hyphenated version creates something unfortunate e.g. expertsexchange.com an unfortunate error when they clearly run a expert sexchange business and keep getting mistaken for 'experts exchange'.
10
You might find Grammar Girl's advice helpful:
... unless you can control exactly how the address will be rendered, it's best to leave off the terminal punctuation or rewrite the sentence so the URL doesn't come at the end.
I terminate a sentence with a period if I am writing for print. However, for online documentation, I would rephrase the sentence. ...
10
There are various reasons for this, amongst them:
Bookmarks - I love the ability to drag and drop the browser address icon to my desktop to mark an important email.
History - Looking through your history can be the quickest way to find an email you read half an hour ago. You need an encoded url to achieve this.
App versioning - when rolling out a new ...
9
I think it's about time URLs in general got abstracted out of sight of ordinary users. Most people couldn't care less about this dotted syntax, the TLDs, the sub-domains, not to mention the protocol part. It's too bad that the current state of technology doesn't offer a superior alternative.
Your aunt doesn't care about URLs. If she even knows which site ...
8
They matter not only because they look "nicer", but also because they usually reflect your information architecture.
For example, BloggersBase, the blogging platform I co-founded, used the following url structure:
http://www.bloggersbase.com/internet/10-to-gain-access-to-blocked-websites/
In this case, we care less about the date, but rather which blog ...
8
It only becomes unwieldy if you need to actually interact with it. And that is not so uncommon. After all - simply the act of seeing the URL is interacting with it already!
But let's say for example I want to translate a webpage and I need to put the URL into the translation engine. Not everyone is a great copy and paste user so imagine having to type it ...
8
I don't think there is any difference from a UX standpoint. But I'd say dashes are much more common and common is good. :)
PHP content management systems like Drupal and WordPress prefer dashes. In the past, Matt Cutts at Google has also recommended dashes:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
Edit: Google recommends dashes/hyphens too:
...
8
I guess it was in the late '90s that I learned that the "right" way to send a URL via e-mail (or on Usenet) is
preceding text <URL:http://www.example.com>.
I can't seem to find that reference now (does anyone know?) and I don't know whether that practice is still considered "right", or by whom.
I either do that, recast the sentence so the URL is ...
7
If there is a better term, it will be very relative to your business.
www.ex.com/subscriber/john_lennon could be appropriate for most news services, even if free.
This can also be quite different from 'profile' paths
www.ex.com/profile/john_lennon
vs. 'account' paths,
www.ex.com/account/john_lennon
where the former is about public image, and the ...
7
The most important part of the long term success of QR codes or in fact any form of 'recognition' technology will be closely aligned to the quality of the content you are directed to.
Having used these codes recently in a case study for mobile context the main issue is where I end up. Almost all the pages I'm directed to are web pages and as I'm only ...
7
Submitting forms with invalid data of any kind shouldn't redirect to another URL. A user is supposed to get feedback of what went wrong and correct the errors made.
But when the user enters data, it's always a good thing to instantly check wheather or not the data entered is valid or not. "Wrong postal code", "no numbers in password", "username already ...
6
Why do you scare away from the validations with regular expressions? You could search your already filled database for the most common data-entries (how the user really enter the urls so far) and write scripts for the top 5 of these input forms.
The scripts should expand the input-url to a correct one and display the correct one in the field after loosing ...
6
Definitely use a per-company subdomain.
There are 2 different ways you can do this:
company.yourcoolapp.com
yourcoolapp.company.com 1
The difference between the two options is slight, but to me, it seems like with option number one, the software user sees that their company is being allowed to use your software on your domain (which is probably the ...
6
I have a Point 3 that is similar to the Point 1, but does not expose the ID of the user (which might give away some information).
Instead, I would simply assume that a given username is, at any point in time, held by a single person. Therefore, the url can simply embed the time (or rather, date):
http://somewebsite.com/2011-10-05/ausername
Then it is ...
6
You can keep domain.com for marketing purposes, use it for the index of the latest events AND keep all content under one domain, which I personally recommend. I really do recommend you use subdirectories rather than subdomains for reasons I will enumerate, however much of my advice can be used with subdomains as well as subdirectories if this is a problem.
...
6
If the article's URL is the slug, then the /1 shouldn't be mistaken as an article ID.
/blog/article-title -> is an article
/blog/2 -> is a page
From a UX point of view, /blog/page/2 does make more sense: if for example the URL is shared, the reader can better guess what is the content going to be. Even if putting more keywords in the ...
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