Wednesday, May 02, 2007

You Think Page Titles are Not Important?

Scenario: I've just spent 20 minutes flipping through an online slide presentation. A very good presentation, obviously. Now that I'm done, I'd like to return to the "1 in a million" Google Search that got me here. I had a good keyword combination that provided some great results that I can't afford to lose. I hit the "Back" button in Firefox and realize that I'm gonna have to click the button 100+ times to go back through all the pages/slides. Luckily I'm a savvy user and know that the drop-down menu of history in Mozilla will take me back to my search results page in one glorious click. Below is a screen shot of what I see:






This is major bullshit and I'm not sure if I should be more angry at lazy developer(s) or the browser folks. Even if I have a drop-down menu full of different titles, it's still never been clear to me that the titles near the top are my "recent" visits or if the titles near the bottom are my recent visits.

Keep in mind that these page titles also make minimized browser screens (you know..at the bottom of your computer screen?) easier to scan before maximizing. It's also what is stored when a user bookmarks your page. Titles that are in-line with the page content won't hurt you in the SEO department either.

Personally, I'd also like to see a number assigned to each history record(in the browser) so that it's immediately clear which links I've visited near the beginning of my session vs. the links visited in the latter portion of my session.