This is a tiny little thing, but I was thinking this morning about how the GAMBIT website uses funny terminology for each of its sections. Back when Philip and I were first designing it, we wanted to name each section after a component of the gaming experience, so “News” became “Updates”, “Careers” became “Join Game”, “About Us” became “Campaign” and so on.
This came up because a graduate student writing an article on us pinged me to ask some very basic questions, which would have all been answered by a quick trip to our website. Initially I was irritated because it felt like said student simply hadn’t done her homework, but then I wondered if perhaps our funny naming conventions weren’t part of the problem. You couldn’t simply type in “http://gambit.mit.edu/people” and go to our people section, or “http://gambit.mit.edu/games” and go to our games section.
Or could you?
Ten minutes later, the GAMBIT site now offers logical redirects at:

• http://gambit.mit.edu/people
• http://gambit.mit.edu/games
• http://gambit.mit.edu/about
• http://gambit.mit.edu/jobs
• http://gambit.mit.edu/news

Trying to anticipate everything people might type in is a fool’s errand, of course, but this is a nice start. Of course, a working search function would be nice too, but that’s coming up fast on the to-do backlog.
…Pation. (Didn’t want to leave you hanging, did I?)