Hi Hanan
The "URI has meaning" crowd have pretty good reasons for thinking in that way - so I'd argue that actually they *are* talking about your audience - ditto, great that it's being used internally, but are internal staff your core audience either...? :-)
My point about Google is not that the *site* comes up high in the results listing - I'd assume it would if you're doing your job right, anyway - but that the *specific page* comes up when people want it. If you decide the page numbering route is the right one, then you could improve this by looking at the SEO placement of the page number. If you felt it was important enough, you could for example put it in the <title> field of your page. This would probably help lift it to the top of any search results listing. This would obviously only be worth doing if you found from your stats that people were consistently using the page numbering system, though...
Cheers
Mike
Mike Ellis
Professional Services Group
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Hanan Cohen
Sent: 16 December 2008 09:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Go to page number
Shalom Mike,
Thanks for your "rambling"
As for "web purists", I have answers for them, but they are not my audience.
As for memorability - it is important to remember the use scenario.
People will read the number from a piece of paper we have prepared for them in advance. No problem here.
Googling for "the science museum" in Hebrew will bring our museum as the first result. (not many science museums in Israel...) No problem here also.
And here's a side anecdote.
I just got an internal email from a colleague asking for changes to some web pages. She had already used the page numbers instead of pasting URL's.
Hanan
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mike Ellis
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 11:29 AM
To: Hanan Cohen
Subject: Re: Go to page number
Hi Hanan
It's an interesting idea - simple and elegant, and works well. There are several things to think about I guess:
1. From a "meaning" POV (I almost said "semantic" then..), the page numbers don't relate to anything. People get very hot under the collar about querystrings in URI's ("museum.com?page=34") and I suspect the purists might feel the same. The problem you have is you are obviously striving for simplicity, so having "pressrelease34" is going to kill the problem you're trying to solve...
2. The very same purists would also want you to consider the persistence of your solution. What do you do if pages are deprecated or need to be removed? What happens when you've got 30,000 pages on your website - do you just keep numbering, or "recycle" numbers?
3. I suspect (as per my earlier post to MCG and my experiences with www.stufflinker.com) that the core majority of your users will have problems relating online and offline experiences. This is the biggest barrier, and one which your solution helps, but doesn't overcome
4. In terms of memorability, your offline users would still need to remember your website URL in order for your solution to be useful. i.e - they might remember that the page they want is 15, but this is of no use if they don't remember "www.mada.org.il". In this scenario, users would do what they usually do anyway - go to google and search for "bloomfield science museum" and whatever the content is they're looking for - OR look for adequate linkage from the home / landing page. One thing I guess you could do is make sure that the page number is considered an important part of the SEO - so if I searched for "Bloomfield Science Museum 15" or "Bloomfield Science Museum page 15" then make sure these results come at the top in Google (they don't right now - your "current page number" is small and low down the page..)
Anyway. Enough rambling. It'll be really interesting to see how users react to this...!
Cheers
Mike
Mike Ellis
Professional Services Group
Eduserv
[log in to unmask]
tel: 01225 470522
mob: 07017 031522
fax: 01225 474301
www.eduserv.org.uk
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