matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)
Mat Bowles ([personal profile] matgb) wrote in [community profile] getting_started 2010-10-07 01:59 pm (UTC)

As as I said in another comment, I like the way it works now

Yeah, it was that I was responding to really, didn't want to make a billion comments.

Having a custom title (meaningful to the owner but meaningless to other users)

Except it's explicitly not meaningless to other users, the opposite is the case, and there's buckets of usability research on this backing it up (both WPTS and Alertbox have good stuff on it).

It's your preference, but it's certainly not good practice for normal use. It should, however, be a style setting, and thus style=mine, style=site or style=light would all give you your preferred regardless.

For both usability and search, decent page titles are essential, and if we're to be a viable public facing blogging platform for those that want a public facing blog, having it as an option will be vital in my, very considered, opinion.

Simply put, lack of decent TITLE tags are the biggest individual reducer in search clickthrough traffic, and substantially imfluence positioning on search results pages.

If someone is looking for a how to on anything, the current default makes it much less likely they'll find something on a DW hosted journal. Given the amount of traffic I still get through Google for "dreamwidth layouts" and similar, many many users are looking for things via search engines &c.

I'm happy for the current behaviour to be the default,b ut do think we ought to have it editable based on user preference.

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