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Guidelines

In reading various sets of guidelines on ulrs I often found reference to the value in sticking with convention. In other words, in all parts of the site be consistent , stick to your URL guidelines, etc. This makes things easier for users (and future developers), as they will have a clear idea of how content is organized into folders and pages. This can apply globally as well for sites that share platforms, brands, etc.

I have been unable to find any guidelines so have collected the following suggestions from various sites.

 

  • Always write for humans first

  • Describe your content. An obvious URL is a great URL. If a user can look at the Address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before ever reaching it, you've done your job. These URLs get pasted, shared, emailed, written down, and yes, even recognized by the engines.

  • Keep it short. The shorter the URL, the easier to copy & paste, read over the phone, write on a business card, or use in a hundred other unorthodox fashions, all of which spell better usability & increased branding. Avoid less important words (e.g. a, the, for , our, as, etc)

  • Only use lower case.

  • Use keywords. Important ones first, not too many (3–5 keywords for file names with a maximum of 50–60 characters to avoid lengthy URLs), do not repeat words for section and sub-section.

  • To avoid confusion for both visitors and search engines, keywords for folders and file names should be separated with a hyphen. The plus symbol (plus) and underscore (_) are options but not recommended.

  • Aim to keep pages closer to the root domain as crawlers assign more relevance to pages higher in the directory structure. This means fewer folders. A URL should contain no unnecessary folders (or words or characters for that matter), for the same reason that a man's pants should contain no unnecessary pleats. The extra fabric is useless and will reduce his likelihood of impressing potential mates.

Example guidelines

 

The following examples might help VUW develop their own

 

 

Subjects

 

Background

In moving from a subject page to topic page approach it is useful to remind ourselves how subject pages are currently named. Here is an example for accounting and actuarial science, both subjects from the Victoria Business School. It shows differences between subjects within a faculty, the old subjects use Banner course code and newer list subject in full with hyphen to denote the space between words:

Here is an example from the Faculty of Science, this time for biology and electronic computer systems. Consistent within the faculty but different paths between faculties.

And another Chinese and political science from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, showing the challenge when there are composite majors used for a subject page:

Law place the programme name where others place the subject:

Proposal

I propose that we follow:

  • /study/[topicname] for all topic pages
  • /study/[topicname]-area for all megatopics that use the same name as a topic (e.g. the Architecture mega-topic would be /study/architecture-area/ and the Architecture topic would be /study/architecture

 

 

Questions

  1. Will our repeated topic pages (Information systems and Geography) be identical in all respects (in which case we can use one url for both instances)? Or will there be different content/links/etc
  2. Do we need urls for the megatopic (i.e. will there be content or a need to address them uniquely)?
  3. Architecture is the only mega-topic with the same name as a topic page. Should we rename it Architecture and building science (rather than append -area to get a unique ulr)?

 

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