On bookmarking entertainment listings

Written by Adrian Holovaty on January 7, 2003

Which local entertainment sites I perused during my trip home to Chicago this weekend:

How many event "detail pages" I bookmarked for further perusal later:

10.

What I decided to attend, after turning off the computer and thinking about it:

A collection of short plays at a small theater on Lincoln Ave.

What my bookmarks looked like when I came back to the computer later, looking for said theater's phone number:

Screenshot of bookmarks with unhelpful names, e.g.: 'The city guide to entertainment, restaurants, events, hotels, movies and busine...'

How long it took me to find the site I'd bookmarked, on a slow connection, with only those page titles to direct me:

Way too long.

Whom I can thank for this inconvenience and usability problem:

  1. Site marketers who obsess over stuffing Web page titles with unhelpful, unmeaningful keywords such as "entertainment, restaurants, events, hotels, movies."
  2. Site designers who put up with that.

Which types of news/information sites should be most bookmark-friendly:

Entertainment listings.

Comments

Posted by prawnFresh on January 7, 2003, at 1:16 p.m.:

Hmmm good point. Thank you for your reminder of title tags, as I had forgotten to include them in a new site I am developing. How could you forget? I hear you cry! Well easy! It's developed in Lotus notes and is therefore a right B*std to remember these little things when they're hidden away!

Cheers matey!

p.s. Never commented on anything on your site before, but found this preview before posting bit an instant relief. Making myself look stupid with glaring grammatical errors seems to be an ability of mine.

pF

Posted by Joshua Kaufman on January 7, 2003, at 4:30 p.m.:

Good entry. The same is also true in Windows when you have several web pages open at one time and all the taskbar buttons (or tabs) have the same title.

I see you've chosen the page title - site title format for your title tags. Have you done any studies on how this compares to the site title - page title format? I tend to prefer the latter because when I'm trying to remember a page, I think "website name" before I think "article name".

Posted by Adrian on January 7, 2003, at 5:47 p.m.:

Thanks, Joshua. Check out this previous weblog entry for some great group discussion on page title formats. It's not an official study, but a lot of readers made some great points, and I think we came to a sort of consensus.

Posted by Dan on January 7, 2003, at 6:16 p.m.:

Wow, that is something I never took into consideration before, and I feel a little dense for not thinking about that. I guess I will keep "Titles" in mind for future websites.

Posted by Anil Dash on January 8, 2003, at 3:31 a.m.:

At least in Internet Explorer, if you hover over the inscrutable titles, it'll show you the URL for the site in a tooltip. If they've got decent URLs, that can be helpful.

Posted by Dan T. on January 14, 2003, at 9:29 p.m.:

I discuss titles (as well as other stuff in the HTML head section such as meta and link tags) in a page in my site.

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