by Lee Asher, 1/14/2006

What's this? A whole article about titles and headlines? Well, yes. Titles are some of the most vital parts of your site, especially if it consists of a series of articles. Yet they're also some of the most ignored elements of all web pages, and more difficult than you'd think to do correctly. You have to realise that you're not writing headlines - it's more interactive than that.

Title Bar, History, Favorites and Searches

Everything you do with your web titles should be geared towards these four places that the title can appear: that is, in a web browser's title bar, history pane, and favorites menu, and in search engine results. Never forget this. Sure, your titles might look just fine on your main page, next to a picture, but do they work out of context? It's even worth looking at the titles in each of these places yourself (or doing a mockup of it), just to see.

Be Concise, but Explain Everything

The thing those four places where titles can appear have in common is this: they're separated from the context of the rest of your page, and they're limited in space. Each one will cut off over-long titles and replace it with an ellipsis ('...') - not good if some important detail goes missing in the process.

What you need, then, is to be concise with your titles: ten words is, effectively, an absolute maximum. However, what you can't do is cut out words that tell the reader what to expect from the article, moving them into a sub-heading or a picture caption or something similar - this works in print, but on the web the reader won't always be able to see those things. The challenge, then, is to create a short headline that tells you what the article is about even if you can't see any other part of the page.