The IA of a site is fairly hard to design. That said it is not impossible to change. I just deployed a site today that redirects 48,000 urls.
We decided after 3 years to adjust how we handle some sections of our site. Additionally we deprecated some classes of products, and thoughtful redirected those to the closest match.
It does take effort. We wrote scripts to get all unique URLs on the original site and crawl those on the new site ensuring zero 404s.
I personally like the blog namespace on my personal site, because it’s descriptive. But seeing that my site is only a blog, it makes sense in the future for me to deprecate that. And I plan too soon.
One way to handle this, is what is the main focus? If it’s a blog, make that the root. Leave the name spacing for secondary actions.
If you have competing interests, then maybe namespace both.
I for sure am moving towards using more namespaces for topical areas, but using more root level names for singular site focus.
The site we released today with tens of thousands of pages uses a lot more namespaces, but because the url helps to inform the intent. Drug names are hard to understand, and we wanted it to read easier.
thanks for the thoughts! I didn't want to call it IA since to me IA goes deeper into structure of content 🤷♂️
yeah I guess personal sites primary focus is showing work (talks and blogposts included). not sure what else I'd put under a namespace. as css tricks shows, it's possible to scale this really really far.
Yeah, I just feel it always starts and includes the urls. Everyone I have worked with always have a top down strategy, once they get past some ideation. Great write up though.
The other thing I was going to say was that I see two approaches, where URLs go from less specific to more specific.
And then on other sites, short URLs are more important and longer namespaces are less important.
I feel we started to migrate to the later, but started with the former.
URL use to have a larger impact on SEO, but now google and other browsers are downplaying them and relying on page content a lot more.
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This is called information architecture formally.
The IA of a site is fairly hard to design. That said it is not impossible to change. I just deployed a site today that redirects 48,000 urls.
We decided after 3 years to adjust how we handle some sections of our site. Additionally we deprecated some classes of products, and thoughtful redirected those to the closest match.
It does take effort. We wrote scripts to get all unique URLs on the original site and crawl those on the new site ensuring zero 404s.
I personally like the blog namespace on my personal site, because it’s descriptive. But seeing that my site is only a blog, it makes sense in the future for me to deprecate that. And I plan too soon.
One way to handle this, is what is the main focus? If it’s a blog, make that the root. Leave the name spacing for secondary actions.
If you have competing interests, then maybe namespace both.
I for sure am moving towards using more namespaces for topical areas, but using more root level names for singular site focus.
The site we released today with tens of thousands of pages uses a lot more namespaces, but because the url helps to inform the intent. Drug names are hard to understand, and we wanted it to read easier.
thanks for the thoughts! I didn't want to call it IA since to me IA goes deeper into structure of content 🤷♂️
yeah I guess personal sites primary focus is showing work (talks and blogposts included). not sure what else I'd put under a namespace. as css tricks shows, it's possible to scale this really really far.
Yeah, I just feel it always starts and includes the urls. Everyone I have worked with always have a top down strategy, once they get past some ideation. Great write up though.
The other thing I was going to say was that I see two approaches, where URLs go from less specific to more specific.
And then on other sites, short URLs are more important and longer namespaces are less important.
I feel we started to migrate to the later, but started with the former.
URL use to have a larger impact on SEO, but now google and other browsers are downplaying them and relying on page content a lot more.