Sunday 23 March 2008 — This is over 16 years old. Be careful.
OmniTI has a new site design, and they’ve done something unusual with their URLs. Rather than have them be primarily noun clauses, as in www.example.com/about/jobs, they’ve made them all complete sentences, leading with an active verb. Their jobs page is omniti.com/is/hiring. A client page is omniti.com/helps/ning. The usual Services section is rendered as does, the blog is thinks, and news archive is remembers.
At first I thought it was a cute gimmick, but maybe it’s deeper than that? Maybe it’s an attempt to make the site design be pervasively about the real problem at hand: talking about the company, and what it does. Rather than have the URLs be about a pile of web pages, they are about the company. Interesting.
Comments
What does using verbs as the top level of your URLs do to the taxonomy of your content?
Does this help/hinder screen readers?
How does this impact internationalization?
At the end of the day, I'm inclined to just chalk this up as a cute gimmick. Somehow I'm pretty sure that this scheme breaks down pretty quickly. I can just see the marketing weenies all gathered around arguing over what the best verb is for the corporate bios. "founded/by/", no wait, how about "employs", urr... "is/managed/by".
... and all the engineers in the room just tapping their legs, bleeding out of their eyes waiting for someone to just. make. a. frickin'. decision. :)
(@giacomo: thumbnails look fine to me.)
http://shiflett.org/blog/2008/mar/urls-can-be-beautiful
(Due to some recent server issues, this URL takes forever to load. Apologies in advance. I hope to resolve this situation soon.)
Robert, I don't think of myself as a marketing weenie. :-) I do take information architecture seriously, and this approach is simply a reflection of rigor. These sentences aren't arbitrary; they fit into a deliberate hierarchy.
It's certainly not for everyone. A valid criticism is that the approach doesn't scale, but our web site is not that large. There are only a few cases where elegance had to be sacrificed for hierarchical purity, such as:
http://omniti.com/is/hiring/with-benefits
I'd prefer to list the benefits on an existing page, but I was taking other opinions into account, and this is one example where I relaxed my standards. Regardless, it's a valid sentence, and it fits correctly into the hierarchy, so it only lacks elegance.
Thanks for noticing.
WWJND? (What Would Jakob Nielsen Do?)
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