I’m starting to see more sites¹ putting the “page title” before the “site title” on their web pages.

Doing this generally goes against my hierarchical aesthetic, however I can see 3 good reasons to set up a page title in this manner:

1. Seach Engine Optimization – having the “real” page title earlier in the title tag can only help.
2. Tabbed Browsing – now that everyone is using a tabbed browser², the first part of the page title (generally the first 10 characters or so) is the reliably visible portion of the tab title.
3. Windows Task Bar – just like the tabbed browsing example above, the title of the button on the Windows Task Bar uses the first part of the page title.

Scott and I actually discussed this quite a bit while designing FeedLounge. We even discussed the possibility of putting the unread count at the front of the page title – but I thought it would be too weird. 🙂

Anyone else been thinking about this?

1. Yahoo! News, for example. [back]
2. If you’re not, please go away. Just kidding… or maybe not. 😉 [back]