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Simplifying print URLs

At a glance

This entry was written on February 17, 2006.

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Let's say you produce a print product (be it newspaper, magazine, zine or newsletter) and a web product. Sometimes in that print product, you're going to want to mention websites ... some of which have very, very long names.

For example, in the sports department I work for, we run a twice-weekly recreation feature that includes a box labeled "On the Web" filled with links to related subject material found on the internet.

We print a little description of the site and then the URL of the site itself. When we're not linking to the front page of a site, that URL inevitably ends up looking something like this: www.theknot.com/ch_article.html?Object=AI91026120447 (this is a real world example of a link that ran with a rec feature this week).

Now, there's a lot of problems with this URL from a strict usability standpoint of theknot.com website itself, but we're not going to get into that here. theknot.com has decided to run their site with nasty, nasty, meaningless URLs ... and we just have to deal with them.

There are also a lot of problems with this URL from an appearing-in-print standpoint. Newspaper readers can't just copy and paste that URL into their browser while they're eating their morning cereal, which means they have to type that long string of letters and numbers into the address bar by hand ... which no one in their right mind is going to do anyway.

Even if they take the time to type that address in manually, there's a high likelihood that they're not going to get it typed in correctly. For instance, what's the second letter after the Object= string? If you print this URL in a sans-serif font, as we did, there's no possible way of knowing if that's a lowercase "l" or an uppercase "i" (for the record, it's an uppercase "i").

Also, if you try to run this URL, or any URL for that matter, in a one-column box, it's going to break over onto multiple lines ... which can introduce hyphens in most pagination software. If a reader types those hyphens in, they're going to get the wrong page. You and I might know that hyphen's not really there ... but chances are good that a sizable portion of our readership will not.

The simple fact of the matter is that this URL should never appear in print. It's a mess; readers won't type it in; and if they do type it in, readers can be expected to get it wrong.

So what do we do if we still want to give the reader access to that information?

We could take a page from the current web and we make it our own.

There are services out there such as tinyurl.com that will turn that mess of a URL up there into something much simpler like http://tinyurl.com/bpssr. See, easier to type and (generally) easier to remember.

It's also outrageously easy to do something similar on your own website using redirects. You could have readers go to http://yoursite.com/links/site or just http://yoursite.com/site and have that page magically whisk you away to some long, nasty URL like that list of the Top 50 Wedding songs up there.

It's a pretty trivial thing to set for anyone with any web design/administration experience at all and I'm not going to go in to how to do it here (unless people want to know the technical details .., and if so, e-mail me). I know that some publications like MacWorld already have a system like this set up for especially lengthy URLs.

The only problem with this scenario is, while it's remarkably easy for the reader (which should be the point ... but usually isn't), it doesn't do diddly for advertising since readers might be typing in an address on your website, they never actually see your website.

The option that would help with our long URL issue and get us a little advertising juice would be to put all the "On the Web" links on a single webpage—something like http://yoursite.com/ontheweb/title. In the newspaper, we can run all the descriptions of the sites and then send readers to this webpage for all those links ... and the ads that are also on the page. Then they click each link (since we're linking from a webpage instead of from a newspaper page, we don't need to do a redirect and the long URLs aren't a concern since no one ever has to type them in by hand) and go to the sites they're interested in.

I'm sure there are other newspapers and magazines out there already doing their printed URLs like this, but I haven't had time to search through and find some real-world examples (aside from MacWorld). Please leave a comment if you know of some publications that are already using this sort of setup; I'm more than a little curious.