Printed URLs should never have extensions

Website URLs are getting longer and more complex, and most of that time that’s ok. If I have a link to share digitally (on here, on social media, via email, via text, etc), the length doesn’t matter — you can just click it. However, if you’re displaying the URL and expecting people to type it in, brevity matters.

There are funny examples like this, which was certainly not intentional (but probably passed by a lot of “it’s not my job to fix it” people before it got printed):

I’m really talking more about things like this, which recently popped up on the display in my car:

The odds of someone mistyping “hyundaiusa.com/owner-privacy-policy.aspx” is pretty high. There are two things that Hyundai could have chosen to do make it easier:

• Create a shorter address, like hyundaiusa.com/privacy
• Buy a custom domain like hyundaiprivacy.com

I suspect it just wasn’t a high enough priority, but for a company that is worth $36B you’d think they could care a bit more. For those not familiar with how things like redirects work, this would cost around $10 and take roughly five minutes to set up.