UCSF School of Pharmacy

Choosing a domain name and URLs

When choosing a domain name and URLs for your Web site, it is essential to consider how usability is affected by your choice. For example, how long does it take to communicate your domain name or URL to someone over the phone? Is it easy to remember? It is easily misspelled? Poor choices can easily translate to decreased productivity and frustrated visitors. That, in turn, can mean higher costs, less income, and fewer visitors for your business or organization.

Well-designed domain names and URLs:

1. Are intuitive. If you're reading February's headlines and the URL is http://myorg.net/2008/02/ you can surmise that you can read January's headlines by typing in http://myorg.net/2008/01/.
2. Are short in length. Shorter is better because it takes less time to communicate and type. Examples:
   1. barnesandnoble.com takes 300% more keystrokes to type and 50% more syllables to speak than bn.com.
   2. http://www.amazon.com/isbn/020530902X is much better than http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/020530902X/ to get to The Elements of Style by Strunk & White.
   3. http://www.ibm.com/jobs/ instead of http://www.ibm.com/employment/.

   Also, when you send a URL in an e-mail message, URLs shorter than about 70 characters long stand a much better chance of not being automatically chopped up by line breaks than those that equal or exceed about 70 characters. Instead of putting a very long URL in e-mail or in print, redirect a shorter one to the longer address. Example: http://myorg.com/go/specialoffer could redirect to a page that has a long URL. Or, use a URL shortening service such as tinyurl.com.

3. Use common natural language words, which are easier to remember. Of the first 5 URLs listed in Cancer Organizations, which are easiest for you to remember? Why? For example, instead of www.nci.nih.gov for the National Cancer Institute which is part of the National Institutes of Health, a better domain name would be cancer.health.gov.

   Avoid incorporating the exact name of your organization or, worse yet, an abbreviation thereof. If possible, use words that describe why your organization exists or a primary topic your organization addresses.

   The only exception to this guideline is an extremely strong brand name. For example, if the name of your organization is more widely known than the name of the topic it addresses: cocacola.com is more appropriate than cola.soda.com. Beware, however, the haughtiness that often goes hand in hand with the authority of naming: "Well, everyone visiting our site will know what NCI stands for." Coca-Cola: most likely yes. NCI and NIH: arguably no. It's far more likely that everyone visiting that site knows what "cancer" and "health" mean -- not "NCI" and "NIH."

   If an abbreviation absolutely must be used, consider a compromise: cancer.nih.gov is still better than nci.nih.gov. Or, consider cancer.health.gov as a mirror site for nci.nih.gov. The domain name with natural language words would target the general public, and the domain name with abbreviations would target scientists who are already familiar with the abbreviations.

4. Are unaffected by the passage of time. If a woman named Dr. Chen starts a new research laboratory at a university and chooses chen.mycollege.edu for her site, what happens when a different Dr. Chen later joins the faculty? Or what happens when she decides to move to another university and a new person takes over? Will the laboratory still be known as the Chen Laboratory? Consider what may change as time passes. For example, a better choice for Dr. Chen's site might be neuroses.mycollege.edu if the lab won't leave with her when she leaves.

5. Have only lowercase characters to reduce productivity costs associated with case confusion and mistyping.

6. Are vocally unambiguous. Use few or no characters or words that can be ambiguous when communicating vocally. For example, base.com might be aurally interpreted incorrectly as pace.com or phone1.com might be aurally interpreted incorrectly as phoneone.com.

7. Are unambiguous in print. Use few or no characters or words that can be ambiguous when communicating in print. For example, lprint.com (lowercase L character) might be visually interpreted incorrectly as Iprint.com (capital I character) or the zeroes in z00m.com (two zeroes) might be visually interpreted incorrectly as zOOm.com (two uppercase O characters).

8. Contain no special characters which are perceived by visitors to be unfamiliar or difficult to type (such as tilde, dash, or underscore). Stick to numbers and lowercase letters, if possible. In particular, avoid underscores in URLs and e-mail addresses because if they appear on a Web page as a link with underlining, the underscore is almost always obscured by the underlining and could cause confusion: "I guess that's a space character."

9. Avoid redundant references to the Web. It's well understood that if you have a URL beginning with http, it works on the Web, so consider choosing domain names and URLs that don't have "www" or "web" or "online" within them. Instead of libweb.myorg.edu, consider library.myorg.edu. Instead of www.department.company.com, use just department.company.com. Also consider using the features of your Web server to redirect www.department.company.com to department.company.com simply because many users will type www. out of habit. (This is known as Class B compliance by no-www.org.)

10. Are chosen from the site visitor's perspective rather than the site owner's. For example, a Web site for a computer support team within a larger organization might be called support.myorg.com or help.myorg.com instead of ts.myorg.com (technical support), it.myorg.com (information technology), css.myorg.com (computer support services), wwisss.myorg.com (worldwide information systems support services) or any other abbreviation based on the current internal name of that department. Arbitrarily chosen names of departments can change over time, but what those departments do usually doesn't.

11. Are easily spelled. For example, instead of guerrilla.org or rheumatism.com or physicians.net, consider warrior.org or arthritis.com or doctors.net.

12. Are uncluttered by lengthy query string variables. Instead, use published techniques to generate clean URLs.

13. Are self-correcting. Your Web server probably has the capability to automatically correct mistakes in entered URLs: spelling ("dinning" and "dining"), mistyping ("prducts" and "products"), case ("AboutUs" and "aboutus" and "ABOUTUS"). Consult the documentation for your Web server to determine how to implement it.

The guidelines above will not often agree with each other. For example, shorter is better, and abbreviations make domain names shorter, but abbreviations also preclude using common natural language words. The challenge in deciding upon effective domain names and URLs lies in balancing all of these guidelines as a whole. Consider yourself fortunate if every one of them can be met for your site.

Go To: Step 6: Set up your domain name if needed or Web Developer's Guide

Sources

1. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, May 2, 1999: "Top Ten Mistakes" Revisited Three Years Later (includes Complex URLs)
2. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for May 1996: Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (includes Complex URLs)
3. Jakob Nielsen, March 21, 1999: Compound Domain Names (includes "Lose the Useless www")
4. Jakob Nielsen, March 21, 1999: URL as UI (includes Persistent URLs Attract Links, Should Domains End in .com?, Domain Names May Die) and Readers' Comments on URL as UI (includes Linkable URLs, Securing Double Domain Registrations, Ambiguity Is Bad, Case-Sensitive Cookies).
5. Tim Berners-Lee, 1998, Cool URIs don't change (includes Why Should I Care?, So What Should I Do?, Designing URIs)
6. Adam Baker, March 5, 2001, How to make URLs user-friendly (includes 4 characteristics that make URLs user-friendly)
7. Brian Kelly, October 1999, Analysis of NFP Web Sites (includes URL Naming)
8. Nolo Press, Choosing and Registering a Domain Name (includes Trademark Protection, Balance Competing Concerns to Find the Best Name, Create an Alternative Domain Name, Avoid Trademark Violations, Securing Multiple Domain Names, Applying for Federal Trademark Protection)
9. Eric Ward, Linking Mistakes To Avoid, Part 1: Link Optimization and Short URLs
10. Jason Gilmore, Creating User-Friendly URLs, April 24, 2003