In working on the design for a new project at CHNM, I sat down today to write page titles for each page of the site. These titles will be dynamically generated. Writing a page title has never been so hard before, but in thinking about all of the things we’re supposed to do these days to keep sites semantically marked up, accessible, and optimized for search engines, I paused and asked myself “what exactly makes a good title?” A quick Google search turned up a 2003 SimpleQuiz discussion on Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits website, and I thought it was worth bookmarking here. In a complex site, as my current project is, in which the core and majority of content is historically valuable information in a database. Questions of how to organize and access this information through a web browser are paramount. And, if someone finds a document he likes, and he chooses to bookmark it, what title should appear in the bookmark list? If Google scans our site, what titles will make sense? I can come up with many ideas, but some are so lengthy they seem useless…off to the drawing board to figure out the optimal solution.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 9:44 am and is filed under design, History and New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.