What clients need - URL Rewriting

Never take it for granted that your clients know what they need or what is possible. This seems like a simple truth, but I am always amazed when others do not take this into account.

Case in point: I was recently working with another web development company as a freelancer and was sitting in on a client meeting. The client’s existing web site used a CMS system, and they were complaining about how unfriendly the URLS are. (We’ve all seen them, www.domain.com/content/category.aspx?cID=12&pID=470573) The sales rep and developer each nodded their head in agreement. They said they could remove the query string from the URL, embedding it in a file name making it friendlier and moved on to the next item on the meeting agenda.

I politely said something like, “Excuse me. How could you use friendlier URLS in XYZ Company?”

This led to a conversation about SEO which was not surprising, but also to usability and marketing. Their marketing person wished they could create an easy to remember and use URL for printed material and even on-line content. For example there was a conference coming up in a few months and they wanted to direct people to a web page related to that conference. They could build the page in the CMS but the resulting URL looked like www.xyz.com/content/page.aspx?p=83542 – not something that could be used in a magazine ad. The first idea tossed out was to make the URL www.xyz.com/content/83524, which is not much better as far as humans are concerned. If you read that in an ad in a trade journal how likely are you to remember it?

It turns out that they wanted was something like www.xyz.com/dec2008. They wanted a URL which would be easy to remember if seen in a print ad or on a web page. Also they wanted to create URLS that are easy to tell someone else, and type into a browser.

They did not want to deal with their IT department and request a dummy page be built that redirected the browsers to the “real” page. IT was busy and not able to respond in a timely fashion to their requests. They needed something that could use the CMS to automate the redirect. Zajon had built something similar for another client – they call it a lead tracker. So we knew it was possible to tweak the existing CMS and have it support the functionality they wanted.

Everyone was satisfied. The client has a method for generating user friendly URLS if they want to use them. The web development company I was working for has another product or service to offer their clients. (The revised CMS also incorporated the more common friendly URLs - www.xyz.com/product/wigget.aspx.)

Back to my original point - Never take it for granted that your clients know what they need or what is possible.

As this example pointed out the clients needed more friendly URLs. What they didn’t mean was shorter or friendly for search engines. They meant friendly from a human point of view. After all, www.xyz.com/dec2008 is easy to remember if you saw an ad about XYZ Company at the December trade show.

Lessons Learned:
Investigate why a client wants something. Try and determine the business need that is driving their request. What they say they want might not be the best solution to their problem.