Designing urls and other text strings

Thomas Vander Wal explores the design implications of text strings (Domain of Digital Design Includes Strings). I used to think I was the only one who cared about the text in a file name or a url, but actually of course a lot of people do. Unfortunately, most CMS’s still produce butt-ugly urls, and I have to admit that I don’t have a well defined process in our user experience practice for defining the url structure for a site. Sometimes we specify the url paths in our content matrices, but not always. Now that people are more aware of the SEO implications of their urls (and the interesting but strange fact that Google views a hyphen but not an underscore as a word delimiter), there’s more attention to this level of the user experience. And that’s a Good Thing.