I’m a lazy browser, and I’m probably not the only one. For example: I never type the ‘www’ in a URL. Usually this isn’t a problem, and it makes life a little lazier easier. When I’m using Safari I don’t even need .com; I type ‘apple/store’ and it automagically converts it to ‘http://apple.com/store’. Browsing was easy, and he saw that it was good.

Then, once in a while, something goes wrong. I’ll type in site.com and a few seconds later find myself staring at a 404, or worse, one of those internet-explorer-esque error pages. But wait! It gets better. When I add ‘www.’ to the address, the site loads!

Why do sites still have this problem? Not just relics from the early 90s, some of them are major corporate ones. It doesn’t make sense that, in an age where the majority of advertising leaves out the awkward ‘www’, some sites continue to require it.

Another problem with URLs is the classic unreadable CMS address. Here’s a classic New York Times link: 2005/10/09/national/09turbulence.html?emc=eta1. Can you remember that? Is it something you could guess? It’s not even a particularly bad example.

Of course content-management systems are going to produce nasty, munged URLs, but there has to be a better way to reach them quickly. Implement an automatic search or dynamic disambiguation pages, a la Wikipedia. That way I could go to nytimes.com/airline+delays or wsj.com/msft and get a listing of related articles. Anything to make the web more streamlined and easily accessible.