[wp-hackers] Some Thoughts/Enhancement Ideas In And Around The Category Side Of Things

[mark waterous]

> From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-
> bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Mike Schinkel
> Sent: Sunday, February 14, 2010 12:56 PM
> To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> 
> On Feb 14, 2010, at 12:49 PM, Mark McWilliams wrote:
> > At the end of the day, you want to setup your site so that it appeals
> to visitors, and is easy to navigate for them! You don't want to link
> to /category/announcements/ in the navigation, you want to like to
> /announcements/ which is just common sense.
> 
> Exactly.

Exactly what?

This debate has encompassed well over half of the posts on the list lately,
and I'm not entirely sure how it's been let go on this long. Having
/category/ in your URL does NOT affect your SEO. If that's the entirety of
your SEO strategy, you need to go back to your books and start studying
again. Having /category/ in your URL does NOT affect your sites navigation.
Period.

If your visitors are having to rewrite the URL and guess at what may or may
not lead them to a new section of the site via personal attention to said
URL, you have failed at designing your site. This is not WordPress' fault,
this is your fault. 100% of a web sites visitors should not have to rely on
browser supplied navigation techniques to traverse your pages, regardless of
their technical knowledge.

There are far more important things that the WordPress core developers could
and should be working on than this.

> At the end of the day, you want to setup your site so that it appeals
> to visitors, and is easy to navigate for them!

Bingo. (Just to elaborate, I'm saying Bingo to this statement outside the
context of /category/.) 

My site URLs could be all written in a dead language, and it shouldn't
matter to my visitors.

--
Mark Waterous
http://mark.watero.us/
(mark at watero.us)