urls – long? short? memorable?

June 17, 2009 Website Strategy No Comments

Travelling today we saw a website url on a van that made us double-take (and laugh). 

The van was fairly ordinary except for the url printed on it of www.barrycursonsplumbingandheating.co.uk.  We’ve seen some pretty long urls in our time but that one has to be up for a top ten award!

But it made us take note of it just to investigate further.

Looking at that website we found content that, although it could be a lot stronger, was adequate for a local company and there’s been an attempt made to get natural search engine positioning.  The purpose of this piece though isn’t to go into the problems with how that SEO has been done, or how the website could be strengthened, but to focus on the url itself …

At a total of 40 characters, that url is far too long for the average person to accurately remember.   We got it wrong on the first attempt to type it in by missing the s on ‘cursons’.  So we dug into the shorter url of www.barrycursons.co.uk and found that it’s owned by the same person and, at a much snappier 22 characters, would have:

a. been more much memorable on the van

b. saved in costs of printing on the van (currently the van almost needs an extension to fit it in)

It made us wonder how many people would have seen that van but they wouldn’t have investigated further because the url was too lengthy, or tried to and failed.  We don’t know the full story behind why such a long url was chosen as the ‘out and about’ visibility of the business but we do know that it probably leads to lost business.

Some would say that ’size matters’.  That’s true in some circumstances but when it comes to urls, we’re happy with our small 17 characters www.custwin.co.uk url.