Does Your UX Suck? Principle #8: URLs Are Meaningful & User-friendly

A URL, or Uniform Resource Locator,  is the address of a website and will start with http://www.

When considering what your URL should be take UX and Google's recommendations to heart, you'll have that URL for a very long time and a bad one can cause you to lose visitors and sales.



URLs need to be User Friendly
Google suggests that URLs be reader friendly, and by this Google means a few things:
Firstly, Google means URLs should be readable by humans.
Humans find the following a little difficult: www.davidcoppermeisterpsychology.com and you see it everywhere on the net. It's an example of conjoined words, joined words. Googlebot, Google's spider that catalogues your website for searches, can't understand conjoined words either.

Keep it simple
Your URL is one of your first opportunities to convey who and what you are to both humans and robots, but an opportunity missed if it can't be read by either.
Sites with complicated spelling may loose visitors too because many, many potential visitors can't spell. Take for example a company with the correct spelling for homoeopathics in their URL, it's easy to imagine that many visitors will struggle with the spelling of homoeopathics. Even if one letter is incorrect when entering a URL, its unlikely that the visitor will find their way to the destination. If you've got a word like this in your URL it would be best to not further complicate matters by conjoining it with other words.
Google and humans would be more comfortable with hyphen separated words like: www.hands-on-homoeopathics.com. Easier to read, right?

No Camels or Underscores
CamelText isn't spider friendly. Camel Text omits the space between two words and uses a capital to indicate the start of a new word. The naming convention is common in web filing systems, but Google doesn't recommend it.
Underscores are unfriendly, too. When the url is underlined which will happen if it's hyperlinked, humans have difficulty seeing the underscores, for example: www.digital_web_group.com, when underlined becomes www.digital_web_group.com

What's a meaningful URL?
UX and Google talk about meaningful URLs in relation to URLs that look like this:

http://www.example.com/welcome/newpage.php?referrerid=789678&threadid=543894 

A URL that ends in a gobbleygook string of meaningless characters can be generated by things like dynamic tracking settings in Content Management Systems( CMS ) and by settings in Wordpress. They aren't human friendly and a real drag to have to manually type into a URL field.