What’s the title of this page? Here are your options, by just taking a quick glance at the page:
- Teens News (title tag, small type under large “start pages” text in orange box)
- Start Pages (highlighted text in both orange areas, highlighted text in blue menu)
- Teens’ News (highlighted text in left-hand menu and in larger orange box breadcrumb link)
- Teens’ News Detail (phrase found by carrot – underneath orange box)
- Teens Feature Highlights (text dropped in an outlined box)
- Teen (largest text on page – but also most difficult to see)
- audience_teens_features (from the URL)
I’m not picking on Seattle – just using them as an example (I’m sure I’ve made similar pages!). Good, simple IA practice would tell us that:
- we need to pick one of these titles for the page, and name everything else the same
- this page needs fewer words that look like titles
- the page file name (audience_teens_features) needs to match the title of the page
- The breadcrumb link (if you must include one) needs to match the name of the page
- The title, breadcrumb link, page file name, etc should all match
- Most importantly – anything in a larger font size looks like a title – you need to make sure it IS a title!
- Also important – anything you highlight will look like a title – make it so
Now – take a peek at your own website – how does it fare compared to this example? What improvements can you make?