Redirect common URLS

I’ve previously pointed to thoughts on URL design. I am of the school of thought that a user should be able to navigate and understand your website’s hierarchy from the URL alone. Continuing on this theme, your website should redirect common URLs. For example, if a user visits http://example.com/contact, expecting your website’s Contact page where your Contact page actually lives at http://example.com/contact_us.html the user is going to have a bad time and probably a 404 for their trouble. The solution is to redirect common URLs to their actual locations¹. Here are a bunch of URLs that I would expect to redirect to their respective locations:

http://example.com/contact
http://example.com/about
http://example.com/help
http://example.com/tos (or /terms)
http://example.com/privacy
http://example.com/join (or /signup, /register)
http://example.com/signin (or /login)
http://example.com/signout (or /logout)

I appreciate the above sounds like common sense but you’d be amazed at the amount of websites that don’t do this².

You could argue that you should be using these common URLs to start with but, you know. ↩
It’s at this point I try to play click-the-link when the webpage has infinite scrolling — the rage. ↩

13 May '13