The Anarchy of Intention: On the Deliberate Abandonment of Predictable Paths
There is a dogma in our trade, repeated so often it has calcified into fact: a website’s URL structure must be logical. It must be a clear, predictable map for both users and machines. A product should live at /products/product-name/, a blog post at /blog/year/month/title/. This logic is presented as an unalloyed good, a cornerstone of usability and search engine clarity. But I want to propose a heretical thought. What if, in our quest for perfect structure, we are sacrificing something more vital: intrigue? What if a little deliberate anarchy in our URL paths can be a feature, not a bug?
The common argument for rigid structure is one of sterility. A predictable path is a comprehensible path. It allows a user to ‘hack’ the URL, to understand their location in the information architecture simply by glancing at the address bar. It reassures search engine crawlers of a page’s context. This is sound advice for a government portal or an e-commerce site selling ten thousand near-identical widgets. But what about the rest of the web? The web of artists, storytellers, and thinkers? For them, a URL is not just an address; it is the first line of the story.
Consider the difference between finding a page at /blog/2024/05/the-morning-light/ and finding it at /glimpses/dawn-breaks-unevenly. The former tells you what you’re getting: a blog post from May 2024 about morning light. It is efficient. The latter, however, invites you. It is a fragment of a narrative. It doesn’t just state a topic; it evokes a mood. It is unpredictable and, because of that, curiously memorable. The structure isn’t illogical; its logic is simply not the industrial logic of categorization. It is the logic of poetry, where placement is about rhythm and resonance, not filing.
This approach deliberately breaks the user’s ability to ‘navigate up’ the directory tree. You cannot truncate /glimpses/dawn-breaks-unevenly to /glimpses/ and expect a meaningful index. And this is precisely the point. This forces a different kind of engagement. It suggests that the site is not a filing cabinet to be browsed, but a world to be explored. It places the burden of discovery on the designer’s curation—on internal linking, on thematic pathways—rather than on the user’s deduction. The journey becomes intentional, not assumed.
Of course, this is not an argument for genuine chaos. Behind the poetic facade, the technical foundations must be impeccable. Canonical tags are crucial if multiple paths could lead to the same content. Redirects must be lovingly maintained so that a changed path doesn’t become a dead end. The anarchy is one of presentation, not of infrastructure. It is a carefully managed wilderness, designed to provoke a feeling of discovery that a perfectly logical, perfectly predictable path can never provide. It asks the user to trust the guide, not the map.
In the end, the choice of a URL structure is a rhetorical act. The tidy, predictable path says, "We are organized and transparent." The deliberately idiosyncratic path says, "We have a voice. Follow it." Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating URL design solely as a branch of information science and started acknowledging it as an element of narrative design. For some sites, the greatest signal a URL can send is not clarity, but character.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: