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I've tried posting this as a support ticket, but nobody seems to be answering those, so I'll try here. I've set the title of my new blog to be "Imaginary Footlights", or at least I thought I did, but when I look at the top of the screen on my blog

http://joseph-dunphy.dreamwidth.org/

instead of seeing the title, I see "joseph-dunphy | recent entries", which to my eye looks more than a little sloppy. Obviously, your system does allow one to have the title of one's blog appear there, as it should, as one can see by looking at a few of the other user's blogs, like this one

http://mikeweaver.dreamwidth.org/

but I can't see how he did that. How does one do that?

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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.

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).

I would love to read an article on this so if you have a link (I couldn't find anything on either site) that would be great since I really really fail to see how "Imaginary Footlights" can be more useful than "joseph_dunphy" and would like to see some arguments for it.

Briefly, and I'll find more later (I really ought to write this up properly anyway, it's not just DW based users who frequently get the importance of titles far too far down their priorities)

For other pages than the homepage, start the title with a few of the most salient information-carrying words that describe the specifics of what users will find on that page. Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it's also used as the label for that window in the taskbar under Windows, meaning that advanced users will move between multiple windows under the guidance of the first one or two words of each page title. If all your page titles start with the same words, you have severely reduced usability for your multi-windowing users. (under "6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility" in the top ten mistakes)

I can't find the specific post on WPTS (I really wish one of the bestusability sites was actually usable, bugbears are us). He does have it, sort of, in the "does my site suck" list the sort of is

Our site's TITLE tag is something like "New Document", "Index" and not the name of your company or other search-engine friendly terms.

Now, for you, "imaginary footlights" is useless, and TBH it is for this specific case. LJ derived users and sites, being frequently inward focused, don't tend to worry about this stuff.

But, my journal title is my actual name. People searching for me online aren't going to search for "matgb" if they want info on my when I'm a candidate (and at least 10 people came to my journal when I was last a local election candidate, came 3rd, not too bad for the area), they're going to search for "Mat Bowles".

I didn't have to do any layer hacking to get "Mat Bowles" displayed as the title first in Expressive on LJ, that's the default.

My username is MatGB, ergo people will find it. Jennie's is Miss_S_B, derived froma very old net handle.

To the overwhelming majority of her current readers, miss_s_b is completely meaningless, she's Jennie Rigg, potential candidate for Party Presidency and a Known Person, nationally. No one is going to search for miss_s_b to find her when she's next up for a national level office, but finding her is something we'd want people to do.

A username can at times be chosen randomly, or chosen at short notice, or even at times the third, fourth of fifteenth choice. I was lucky, MatGB was my second choice on LJ, after MatB, and using the middle initial works better anyway. Others?

We sell rename tokens for a reason, right?

To me, your rename is slightly confusing, but at least I know all about it. A journal title can be both more fixed and, importantly, more flexible. If I write about something specific regularly, I can add that, if I set up a comm or a new journal for a specific use, I can set the title to be very user friendly and indicative.

A username is just that. DW_News is "Dreamwidth News" to us. But to a mainstream audience, it's Home | Deutsche Welle. Or even for fandom BBC - Doctor Who - Doctor Who: The Adventure Games - News & Features.

The username is a lot less useful than the journal title. That a large number of users don't, currrently, think about the importance of the page title is a reason to strengthen it's use, the username is nowhere near as meaningful, even currently, let alone in a few years when the most expressive personal names are all gone.

"Imaginary Footlights" is a useless title, to us, but it might mean a lot to readers of that blog, especially if they come in from elsewhere. But if I get around to setting up the Comm for the local film festival I keep meaning to, it'll likely have a comm name like "ffw-bradford" or similar. But the Title will be "Fantastic Films at the Media Museum".

That's meaningful, and useful.

You're thinking entirely of on site users, on site traffic, and your preference for thinking by username. I'm thinking of general users, a new-to-the-site audience, and for off site traffic, including DWers who aren't solid core users looking for useful content. A username tells people very little at times.

But a blog title can, and should if done well, tell a lot.

Thanks for the links and the explanations. I see your point but I have to say my experience hasn't shown me that it was mostly done well (Edit: no matter what sort of site it was BTW.)

Edited 2010-10-07 16:06 (UTC)

What's that silly aphorism? 99% of stuff on the internet is crap?

It's mostly done badly, but most things are mostly done badly by most people that do them. In our case, we actually encourage people to do it badly as we don't put any encouragement into thinking about the impact of it overall.

But most news websites these days will, having studied and paid a lot to make sure they get all the clickthroughs they can, have their titles set to display "NEws Item Title | News Section | Sitename", and they do that for a reason. The exceptions tend to be either lower down the market not thought through sites, and the really big brands; the BBC deliberately puts "BBC News" first in all its titles, as they know that that's such a trusted brand it'll increase clickthroughs.

(and if I was organised enough I would be making a serious living getting people to do this right, I'm a flake, and am terrible at being self employed, so I don't, but I do follow the industry discussions on it when I can, it really interests me, my coding isn't up to much, my visual design skills are non-existent, got to be good at something, right?)

To me, your rename is slightly confusing, but at least I know all about it.

I've made a suggestion about that actually. ^_^

I do remember - now - back when I was making the old fashioned html pages. The information in between the title tags were very important, especially if the site was for an organization. I had to put the org's name, then the page title in so the user and the search engines would find them easily.

The first thing search engines hit will be the title of the journal, and if the journal is for an organization, I can see why it is very important that a user would want fine-tuned control over that. Ditto for authors trying to establish an online presence for themselves or for a specific book. Maybe they won't turn to a Live Journal or a Dreamwidth for such a thing, but it should be made an option for those that do.

Exactly, except...

I had to put the org's name, then the page title in so the user and the search engines would find them easily.

These days it's advised best practice to put the page title first, then org name, for most circumstances. There are exceptions, but it's to do with the way people respond to search results pages, they tend to scan and normally go to the next line after glancing at the first three words.

Ergo, title first, as that should be what they're actually looking for.

And there are a large chunk of authors that use LJ as their main or only presence, and there'll be a few politicians using DW when some of the other features we've planned are live (and not just lowend politicians like me and SB, hopefully).

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