I have a website like Zomato. There are restaurants, and each restaurant has a page based on the country it's located in. One restaurant in the US can have the same name as another in Switzerland, but are not related at all.
I need the businesses to be able to post the URLs of their pages along with the urls of their social media pages. For example:
- facebook.com/mcdonaldsCanada
- twitter.com/mcdonalds_ca
- instagram.com/ca_mcdonalds
- ourwebsite.com/...
What would be the best option for choice of URL structure?
Option 1:
- facebook.com/mcdonaldsCanada
- twitter.com/mcdonalds_ca
- instagram.com/ca_mcdonalds
- ourwebsite.com/ca/mcdonalds
Pretty much straight forward. You put the country followed by the business name. This will be uniform for all businesses to prevent fragmentation such as mcdonalds_ca and canada_mcdonalds.
Pros:
- Easy to manage; simple structure.
- Easy to differentiate between local businesses.
Cons:
Restaurants will have to follow our website logo (like how they put the logo of facebook followed by /businessname) or url with a /ca and then their business names, as opposed to the uniform way of having the business name right after our domain name. For example:
- [FBLogo]/mcdonaldsCanada
- [TwitterLogo]/mcdonalds_ca
- [InstaLogo]/ca_mcdonalds
- [OurLogo]/ca/mcdonalds
Option 2:
- facebook.com/mcdonaldsCanada
- twitter.com/mcdonalds_ca
- instagram.com/ca_mcdonalds
- ourwebsite.com/mcdonalds (enters this url and redirects to one of below)
- ourwebsite.com/ca/mcdonalds
- ourwebsite.ca/mcdonalds
- ca.ourwebsite.com/mcdonalds
In this option, the user types in the name of the business, the page of the restaurant closest to him based on his GPS or IP Address location will open up, but first a modal will show up asking him to confirm the location of the restaurant with a checkbox provided to remember his choice. If he confirms his location, the modal simply disappears as he's already on the page, otherwise, it would take him to the page of the other location he chose. On the page there would always be an option available to change location, should the user wish to do so upon return, if he enabled the "remember" option.
Pros:
- Looks more similar, yet better than, the other social media links. (Looks good next to a logo)
- Shorter.
- Easier for the user to remember and use URL.
- More choices of differentiating location through URL (can be through tld, subdomain, or subfolder "/").
Cons:
- IP Address and GPS tracking is not always guaranteed to be right.
- Extra clicking for users on first visit as it prompts them to confirm location.
- More difficult to implement.
- Might make users think two businesses are the same if they both used the same URL, even though they would be provided with the choice of confirming location upon visit.