A colleague passed this post from SEOMmoz.org on to me — 11 Best Practices for URLs — and it seemed to tie the whole URL naming issue up with a nice little bow. The author even addresses the sub-optimal URLs (http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1422) they use for the site.
Besides not posting for weeks (yes weeks) I realized that, so far, we’ve definitely had an online tilt to things (such as they are) here at Doing Media. Well, that’s got to change — but not yet.
So… I teach media communications courses, among them “Web Publishing.” Pretty broad topic but essentially it’s web production 101. For my students, naming their pages and their files (URLs) is part of our Information Architecture module.
It takes them awhile to get it because at this point in website consumption They take it for granted. They don’t notice page titles or URLs because I think they figure it’s the luck of the draw — if they bookmark a page they’ll figure it out later if it doesn’t come with a good title or URL. If it does have something understandable in the browser title bar or address box it’s a bonus!
Once I point out why good page naming and file (and folder) naming is good for them and for their visitors there is always an ‘A-ha!” moment. And so it’s interesting that after all these years of web site production professionals still have these conversations and reminders of best practice.
Read on. And I promise we’ll get to less online-ish stuff soon. No, really.
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