10 2. BUILDING FOR USERS: DESIGNING URLS
some don’t provide URLs at all, making a site hell for anyone who wants to send something cool they found to their friends.)
And when people who use such software find themselves having to write a URL on a t-shirt or link to something from an email, they create a redirect—a special URL who’s only purpose is to introduce people to the nightmarish randomnumber system used by their actual website. This solves their immediate problem of figuring out what to write on the t-shirt, but it doesn’t solve any of the more fundamental problems, and it doesn’t make it possible for everyone else to make their own t-shirts or send out their own emails.
If your tools don’t let you design your URLs, you need to get better tools. Nobody would dare do graphic design with software that didn’t let them change the font or paint with a brush that could only make squares. Yet some people think it’s perfectly fine to sacrifice control over their URLs, the most fundamentally important part of your website. It’s not. Get better tools.[1]
Once you have decent tools, it’s time to start designing. Let’s start with the biggest constraints first. URLs shouldn’t change (and if they do change, the old ones should redirect to the new ones) so they should only contain information about the page that never changes. This leads to some obvious requirements.
These were most famously pointed out by the Web’s inventor, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA (b. 8 June 1955, London, England). During a miraculous Christmas break in 1990 that reminds one of Einstein’s annus mirabilis,Tim not only invented the URL, the HTML format, and the HTTP protocol, but also wrote the first web browser, WYSIWYG web editor, and web server. (Makes you want to give the guy more Christmas breaks.) Although, in fact, this is slightly redundant, since the first web browser (named WorldWideWeb), not only let you read web pages, but let you write them as well. The idea was that the Web should be an interactive medium, with everybody keeping their own notebooks of interesting things they found and collaborating on documents with people and posting stuff they’d done or wanted to share.
Editing a web page was as easy as clicking on it—you could just switch into editing mode and select and correct typos right on the page, just like in a word processor. (You’d hit save and it would automatically upload them to the server.) You could create new pages just by opening a new window and instead of bookmarks, you were expected to build web pages keeping track of the sites you
- ↑ If you need a place to start, there’s of course my own toolkit, web.py (http://webpy.org/) as well as the Python web framework Django (http://djangoproject.com/).
