Structuring the page title tag

While it’s quite normal for website page titles to incorporate the site name, there are a couple of differing opinions on how this should be structured. One school of thought suggests that the site name should have prominence, like this:

<title>site name - content heading</title>

The other school of thought considers the actual content heading to be much more important, like this:

<title>content heading - site name</title>

Both methods are in widespread use. So, which is better?

In my opinion, putting the site name before the actual content heading drastically reduces usability because it hides the most relevant information from the user. Here’s why:

• The first 100 odd characters of the title also become the browsers window title.
• When the user minimises their browser, a portion of the page title is displayed in the taskbar, along with all the other applications that user happens to be running.
• With a tabbed browser such as Firefox, a portion of the page title is displayed in the actual tab caption.
• When a user bookmarks the page, the bookmark menu will only display the first 60 odd characters of the title.
• Search engines typically display the first 60-90 characters of the title in their results pages.

Look at any major software application. It always puts the document or task name first, before the actual name of the application. Why is that? Because the document or task name is what’s important to the user, not the application name.

Your browser also follows this convention by placing its own name last in the window title.

Those websites which place the site name before the content heading are only doing it for marketing reasons because they believe their “brand” is more important then their content.

Or their customers.

Posted in HTML, Marketing, Usability, Web by Ivan