by Trenton Moss, 4/1/2005
You know exactly what your organisation does and what your website offers its users. This information has probably become second nature to you, but first-time visitors to your site won't know this. As such, make sure you don't forget to tell them what you do.
As soon as new site visitors arrive at your website the first thing they need to know, before anything else, is what you do. You can talk all you like about how great you are, but unless you spell out what you actually do, they won't even know what you're so great at! This oh-so-overlooked yet such basic of information can be communicated to your site visitors in a number of different ways:
Page title
Don't just use the page title to tell me who you are; tell me what you do too. If your company is called Bloggs Ltd don't only place the words, ‘Bloggs Ltd’ in the page title as there's plenty of room for more information. If Bloggs Ltd sells widgets, a good page title might be: ‘Bloggs Ltd - Buy widgets online‘.
Note in this example, ‘Buy widgets online‘ was used to describe what Bloggs Ltd does, and not ‘Widget seller’. When describing what it is you do be sure to speak the language of your users, and don't talk from your point of view. From your point of view you sell widgets, but from their point of view they want to buy widgets online, so do bear this in mind when authoring the page title.
The page title is the first thing that appears on screen, and especially on dial-up modems can be the only thing that displays for the first 10 seconds or so. For many web users this is the first piece of content they'll read on your site.
The page title is also very important for search engines, which place more importance on the page title than any other on-page element. Descriptive page titles are also essential for blind web users utilising screen readers, as it's the first thing that gets read aloud to them upon arriving at the page.
Tagline
A good tagline is one of the most important usability features on any website. A good tagline should be explanatory and not vague, clear and informative and about four to eight words in length. A tagline is different to a company slogan, in that the former describes what the organisation/website does whereas the latter is designed to evoke certain feeling or create a brand.
‘Priceless’ and ‘I'm loving it’ are slogans by Mastercard and McDonald's respectively - they differ from taglines because they don't describe what the organisation does.
Taglines are so important because no matter on what page site visitors enter your website, they'll always be able to quickly gain an understanding of what your organisation and website offers. This can be especially true for site visitors coming into internal pages from search engines - by telling these site visitors what you do through the tagline, they may be more likely to explore your site beyond the initial page on which they enter.
Taglines are also good for search engine optimisation, as they appear on every page right at the top of the page, an area on to which search engines place importance.