SOE and usability basics: Page Titles

There are a few (relatively) popular sites that do not even attempt to provide unique page titles for article pages. For example, Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon.com or 3QuarksDaily both use the same title for all pages.

This is a huge pain in the neck if you have multiple pages from those sites open in a browser. It would be much more useful (for bookmarking, etc.) if the page title included the title of the primary content on the page.

For example, instead of simply using

Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

for every page, a unique title that gave a hint to the contents

Follow-up on the Citizens United case − Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

would be much better. Sites can feel free, of course, to limit the number of characters of the post’s title to use in order to retain the section (Glenn Greenwald) and site (Salon.com) when creating bookmarks. For example,

Follow-up … Citizens United case − Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

or

Follow-up on the Citizens… − Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

would both be much more user- and SOE-friendly.