What's in a Name?

It’s time to reclaim the Web address. Back in the early days of the Web, many thought that the URL, that strange http-colon-slash-slash thing we had to type into the browser to get to a Web site, would someday be replaced by a more elegant and user-friendly address. Not only are URLs still with us, but while we may not remember what the acronym stands for—if we ever knew—those ubiquitous www’s are more than ever a part of daily life.

Once regarded as a necessary technical evil, the humble URL has instead become a familiar touch-point for Web surfers. URLs provide Web pages with context, and affirm to Web surfers that they are in the right place. We expect Web addresses to be clear and descriptive, and often type them directly into a browser, trusting that they will get us where we want to go.

Savvy Web marketers direct visitors to specific pages through URLs, and use them to delineate a clear site structure that reinforces site content and meta “keywords”—the currency of Web search engines like Google and Yahoo!.

But as the Web has grown in sophistication, something ugly has happened to the URL.

Creating A Monster

With the advent of database-driven Web sites, the URL has taken a turn back to the unseemly world of the too-technical. For example, nearly everyone knows the address: www.amazon.com. But if a registered user hits the home page, the URL looks something like…

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home
/home.html/104-7098954-459786353

And such user-unfriendly transformations are not limited to registered users. The home page URL for consulting giant Bearing Point is…

www.bearingpoint.com/portal/site/bearingpoint

A little long, but English, anyway. But then click a navigation link—About Us, for example—and you get…

www.bearingpoint.com/portal/site/bearingpoint/
menuitem.05c5a3df5e7e1b521dba0624826106a0/
channel/published/About%20us/

And the Bearing Point site isn’t providing any particular feature. It’s just serving the page.

These URLs provide no more informational or aesthetic value to the visitor than a car wearing its engine and wiring on the outside. Don’t get me wrong. The Frankenstein software systems that create such addresses have made the Web a marvelous medium of communication, commerce, and interactivity. Database-driven pages, content management systems, e-commerce solutions, CRM software, blogs, and other back-end Web engines, have made the Web a rich resource for doing business, finding information, learning, and being entertained.

But the visible detritus of progress is the undecipherable, raw, variable-laden code that has entered page presentation via the address field. So what is a software provider to do?

I can tell you from direct experience that transforming our man-made monsters back into human-readable URLs is a difficult and complex task. But the returns go far beyond the obvious benefit that comes from user-friendly presentation.

Since 2001, Tacklebox CMS, our own content management system, has spawned URLs like…

www.brookgroup.com/engine/content.do?
PUBLIC_ID= 31Z06&BT_CODE=
BG34Y12&TT_CODE=BGSUBPAGE

As a CMS vendor that also prides itself on being a world-class design and customer experience shop, we long ago set as a goal the return of human-readable URLs to our CMS-driven sites. With the advent of Tacklebox version 5.1, order is at last restored.

Realizing the Benefits

URL rewriting transforms machine-generated addressing into familiar, language-based Web addresses. The Tacklebox Human-Readable URL feature allows site managers to change the way a page’s URL segment looks. In HTML, the names you give to folders and pages are reflected as URL segments. In Tacklebox, when you add a page, the system assigns it a URL name—a page address—based on its name. You can edit that address at any time, and the change will be reflected in the site URLs.

This feature not only makes your pages much clearer to site visitors, but goes a long way to help increase your visibility with Web search engines. Using Web addresses that echo keywords and content within the same page will directly benefit your page rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Not only do search engines “prefer” sites whose URLs have keywords in them, but they can penalize sites that contain such database-created URL characters as question marks.

Human-readable URLs are easier to remember, and importantly to marketers, easier to tell people. If you want to build a campaign around a specific page, you can name that page in a way that reinforces the campaign, and create a unique URL for campaign tracking.

From a visitor point of view, the human-readable URL is indicative of what the page is about. Web-savvy visitors will quickly grasp your naming scheme and use it to explore your site. A surfer who types in a URL that results in a “Page Not Found” message may be able to reach the page by checking for a typing error. Or they may try to “hack” the URL by removing the end segment. This is almost impossible if it is not human-readable.

From a site manager’s point of view, old site pages can be replaced with new ones without the URL changing—especially important if other sites link to that page. Human-readable URLs usually will result in shorter addresses, which won’t “break” when copied into e-mail messages.

Whether you call them human-readable, user-centered, user-friendly, spider-friendly, or URL rewriting, the return of the plain-language URL is a boon to site visitors and owners alike, a key feature for organizations looking at CMS systems, and for us, a happy return to making our Web sites accessible, logically-organized, and easy to use.