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When it comes to designing web navigation and URL structures for web sites, simple is usually better. This is usually lost on companies hosting web sites for college athletic departments. But in the case of Major League Baseball, the design is almost comedic, and the "MLB, MLB" might take you back to the classic "Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger" sketches on Saturday Night Live.

You see, Major League Baseball wants to make sure you know where you are when you get to MLB.com. So to avoid any confusion, the default URL for the web site is http://mlb.mlb.com/:

The site is also very helpful if you want to visit the official pages for the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, adding the city name to the URL in case you might actually be looking for the Omaha Yankees or the Harrisburg Phillies:



URLs like that are so long people will have to bitlytize them if they want to use them in twitter. For example, if you wanted to tweet the Yankees schedule, the full URL of http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/schedule/index.jsp?c_id=nyy&m=4&y=2010 would eat up 69 characters of the 140 allowed on twitter (making it hard for people to retweet). Ideally, the link for the schedule should be as simple as http://yankees.mlb.com/schedule (31 characters), but right now that would give you an error page.

Even worse, if you try to take the "?c_id=nyy" off of the URL and leave only http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/index.jsp, you will not get to the Yankees page. You will be sent to the MLB.com home page. Try it for yourself. On the other hand, if you just use http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/, the link WILL take you to the Yankees page. You can try that too.

Remember earlier I said these issues were comedic? Actually they are not, and it is just the tip of many issues on the site. The issues are indicators of an over thought, over engineered web site, that did not consider the end user experience in all ways.