J . M A I L

New bottom bar on TwitCritics

From the TwitCritics Blog:

Slight tweak to our bottom bar. We are in the process of working on a lot of exciting big things but we are still paying attention to the little details that make your experiences on twitcritics as easy and understandable as possible.

Our careful and considered solution to the bottom bar design was to group items according to who we think will be using them.

General Users:

Home, About, Press, Contact

Developers / Power-users:

Blog, Widget

Business (is self explanatory)

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Here at TwitCritics we believe, “Little things can make a big difference”.

What’s in a name? The usability of web names

I learned today that on the web a name is not just a name.

Example 1: http://pixelposition.com/hyphens-underscores/

On twitcritics we were using underscores on our links to movies ie: http://twitcritics.com/movies/men_who_stare_at_goats

This is not the best practice. FTA:

Concensus of “repeat opinion” is that hyphens have an SEO value. Why? We know hyphens are seen as word separators. We don’t know, for sure, how Google, Yahoo! and Live Search interpret underscores.

Google’s does give their recommendation for URL structure in their Help pages.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

Vanessa Fox wrote about best practices for image filenames on Jane and Robot. She discusses the issue in the following paragraph:

Make image filenames descriptive

If your filename includes multiple words, use hyphens to separate them (search engines tend to see a hyphen as a separator and an underscore as a joiner (so lavendar_plant would be seen as one word and lavender-plant would be seen as two).

The following is from April 2006 from Matt Cutts’ blog, Google’s chief engineer:

And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores…

I made a mistake when thinking about the design of our web links on twitcritics. I will learn from it and hopefully you can learn from my mistake before you do it too.

Example 2: Picking a twitter name

Users on twitter with number or underscores just get less followers. Don’t use them.

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Do:

• try to make your name as short as possible, when people want to retweet your posts every character will count and 140 characters go quickly (why waste them with your user name?)
• use your real name in your twitter user name, people are already hard enough to find online

Don’t:

• use gimmicky names on twitter
• use numbers or underscores