Linking out to the web presence: choosing identifiers

One of the thing we've learnt from linking out to the university website is that URIs need to be short and consistent. At some points in the game, the user is asked to visit an external web page with the relevant URI being displayed not only as a link, but also in a "shortened" form in case they wish to remember the address for future visits. At some points, it was necessary to set up an additional shortened URI if one for the page did not already exist.

Based on this experience, we have developed additional guidelines for "short" URIs that we will be adopting across the whole of the University's web presence. The existing guidelines for short URIs were limited to:

1. Should avoid ambiguity, e.g. sometimes there's a crossover between "Business School" and "For Business", so URIs containing "business" have to be carefully selected.
2. They must not contain a year or other date reference, because they effectively go "out of date" and in the case of recurring events, require a new one to be set up each year.

New guidelines for URIs

Future practice will include:

3. Short URIs must be all lowercase.
   This is because they are case sensitive, and most users assume lowercase as it avoid additional key presses, especially on mobile devices.
4. No underscores, dashes or other characters.
   When saying the URI out loud, characters such as "dash" have to be pronounced, and many users confuse "dash" with "slash", or even "underscore". An exception may be made if the "running together" of words on the user's part leads to unintentional pronounciation ("Therapist Finder" being a classic example!)
5. Multiple short URIs to one canonical URI will no longer be approved.
6. They must not go directly to non-HTML content.
   There must be an "intervening" web page first, in order to prevent "PDF shock".
7. They must not lead off site, i.e. to somewhere not on staffs.ac.uk.
   An exception may be made for linking to the University's official social media accounts.

List of URIs used in the game

Not all of the links from My New Uni are actually shortened URIs, but the complete list is as follows:

URL	Owner
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/accommodation	Accommodation Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/ask	Information Services
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/counselling	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/courses_and_study/student_services/health/	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/courses_and_study/student_services/student_guidance/	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/disabledstudents	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/disabledstudents/mental_wellbeing/	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/helloamd	Faculty of Arts, Media and Design
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/hellobusiness	Business School
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/hellofcet	Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Technology
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/hellohealth	Faculty of Health
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/hellolaw	Law School
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/hellosciences	Faculty of Sciences
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/informationcentre	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/infozone	Information Services
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/jobzone	Careers Centre
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/newstudent/full_time_students/faq.jsp	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/newstudent/full_time_students/faq.jsp#tvlic	Student Office
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/resnet	Information Services
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/studyskills	Information Services
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/sustainabletravel	Health, Safety and Environmental Unit
http://www.staffsunion.com/activities/	Students Union
http://www.staffsunion.com/advice/moneydoctors/	Students Union