Page Titles : Designers allways get it wrong.

One of the most important differences between on-line and off-line journalism is the style of headlines. In a newspaper, headlines should be catchy - inviting you to read on. On a website, they should be informative, telling you what's on the other side of a link. The barrier to clicking a link is far greater than the barrier to move your gaze down the page, so non-informative headlines will mostly fail to grab the users attention. Would you click a link called Free beer!" or Sex! Violence!?

These are the simplest attention-grabbers in print, but they rarely work on the net. Most online publications have learned this, pioneers like Wired and Salon have done it well, for a long time. Others, like Aftenposten (a Norwegian newspaper) have not. Which is why the RSS feed from Aftenposten is stuffed with nonsensical titles like "Smile, you're a master!" and "Q-sale with good lasting value" (both samples from the current RSS feed). I don't know what those articles are about, there's no way for me to tell from the title, and I'm not about to click the link in order to find out.

So much for articles. And then we have web pages themselves. The title of a web page is the text that goes into the <title> tag of the html. It's what you see on the very top of your browser window. It's what will become the name of the bookmark if you bookmark a page.

Bookmarks are important. Boomarks are what creates repeat visitors, the golden llama of e-business. Bookmarks are the primary tool used by users in establishing web habits. But if your bookmarks have nonsensical names, chances are you'll never visit them again.

And for some reason, web design related websites - whether they be fora, news services, blogs, or company homepages - are just as bad offenders as Aftenposten. Amongst the 60-80 bookmarks in my "Web Design" folder, it's impossible to tell by the titles which site was the one selling those cool fonts I want to buy, which one was the blog I enjoyed reading, and which one was the community site dedicated to standards compliant web code.

Here are, to my mind, the worst title offenses:

Brand-name-itis

So you have a cool name for your site. "FlowerPowerDesign", say, or "e-Rug". And that's your title. It'll make it easy for users to return, right? Wrong. You're not Samsung, Nike or Google. Casual visitors won't remember your brand name, they'll remember your content.

Keyword-itis

"E-commerce, e-learning, dotcom, web design, print design, graphic design services. Looks good in a search engine, right? But not as a bookmark. From keyword lists, it's impossible to tell anything about the site itself. Is it a blog? A forum? A news service? A service provider?"

Creativity Unleashed

We all want to be original, but originality has it's price. The labelling of a website is not the place to make your statement of originality, it's the place to inform readers about what they'll find at the other end of the link. "-=*=- design" is not a good title.

Forgetfulness

"Welcome to site 5 template B". 'nuff said.

The worst offender in my Design folder is a website featuring a forum for design discussions called "Four09" or "409", with the domain name "four09.org". Their title? Trust Us. Right.