verbose URLs or short and sweet?

[RioBrewster]

There’s some discussion at my place of work about standardizing directory and file naming conventions.

On one hand – verbose but descriptive paths are easy to remember and SEO friendly.

The other argument is that typing a long url – especially one that might require using a shift key – is really hard to do on a table or phone, or for those who have impaired motor skills.

Personally I think I’ve typed a url longer than a domain name on a phone or tablet only a handful of times . We have about 15 developers, and very large sites – most of which require breadcrumbs. So I think making file and directory names descriptive is more important than making them easy to type.

Just wondering what others here think.

Thanks!

[Melindrea]

I think it depends a lot on how you mean by “verbose”, and how long we’re talking here.

Something that has come up a few times here is that how often do people actually write in URLs nowadays? In particular on the phone/tablet, I at least often google rather than typing it in.

Don’t go with hard to understand just to make it short, because it’s going to be easier to remember “/articles/why-long-urls-arent-that-much-of-a-problem” (if you’re actually wanting to remember it) than “/a/wluatmp”.

[Author]

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