I agree with Zak. If you want to access a URL, then people will type it in. Using a commercial URL shortener is a no-no as they may disappear at any time. Running your own means that you have to maintain two websites, potentially. One for your short links, and the one they actually point to. Perhaps it’s best just focussing on making URLs nice to type – ‘pretty’ URLs even though I hate that phrase.

Browsers like Chrome even start to do the work for you as you type a URL. Let them do the heavy lifting.

It’s not so hard to type a URL in really – keep it simple – footnotes FTW!