How to Be a URL Womble

A presentation at Oxford Geek Night 3 in July 2007 in Oxford, UK by Drew McLellan

Slide 1

How to be a
URL Womble Drew McLellan
Oxford Geek Night - 25 July 2007

Slide 2

Underground, Overground,
Wombling Free. URLs are used in all sorts of ways, but once released into the wild they are free.

Slide 3

Making good use of the things that we find. Good URLs are built from the content of a page, and describe what can be found there.

Slide 4

Things that the everyday folks leave behind. Good URLs reflect the content of the page - even if that content is user generated.

Slide 5

Wombles are organised, work as a team. Pay attention to consistency; the user should be able to predict where a page will be.

Slide 6

Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean. Avoid cruft and anything that exposes the technical implementation of your site.

Slide 7

People don’t notice us, they never see; under their noses a Womble may be. Good URLs are natural and go unnoticed because they create no new problems.

Slide 8

We womble by night and we womble by day, looking for litter to trundle away. Good URLs are as short as possible; containing all the required information but no more.

Slide 9

Thank you! http://allinthehead.com/presentations/2007/url-design.pdf