URL Naming convention in SharePoint 2010

URL Naming convention:

Check the spelling of words you include in the URL name and be consistent in your naming conventions; for example, don’t call a picture library pictures in one site and images in another. For some SharePoint components, such as the URL for a site, you cannot change the URL later.

If your aim is to make the URL readable and the URL consists of several words, use an underscore (“_”) in place of a space or remove the space and capitalize the first character in each word. For example, replace the three words Wide World Importers, with either Wide_World_Importers or WideWorldImporters. The underscore is the better of these options because all popular search engines and spiders understand it as a word separator.

Although the space character is a legal URL character, there are several issues with having one or more spaces in the URL, such as the following:

Readability: A space in the URL name is URL-encoded as %20, so the resulting name is difficult for people to read. A site with a URL of s p f would result in an encoded version of s%20p%20f, six extra characters.

URL length limitation: A URL must contain no more than 260 characters. SharePoint refers to every site, list, library, list item, or document as a URL. SharePoint prefixes the document name by the document library’s URL, which is prefixed by the site’s URL, then by its parent’s site’s URL, and so on. In addition, when a user edits documents or list items, SharePoint appends the URL of the document library or list, so that when the user clicks Save or Close, the browser redirects them to the list or library in which the item was saved. If the URL for the list or library contains two spaces, it contains six extra characters. Then, as the URL is appended for editing, that adds another six extra characters, making 12 extra characters. Therefore, if you consistently use long names, you’ll eventually have problems, which is exaggerated if you use spaces.

Links in e-mails: If you incorporate a URL in an e-mail message, some e-mail programs truncate the URL at the first space when sending the clickable link to the recipient, resulting in a broken link. When users click the link, they are taken to an invalid location in the browser and won’t understand why they can’t find the document.


Source: Step by Step SharePoint Designer 2010 by Penelope Coventry