[wp-docs] Re: The Codex Main Page

[Morgan Doocy]

On Dec 21, 2004, at 10:30 PM, Carthik Sharma wrote:
> It is not my primary concern. My primary concern is whether the title
> sums up what the page is about. It is, though, of concern to me on a
> different level - that of being a sensible and standard title - which
> is where I prefer using the basic form of words, over modified forms,
> such as gerunds and infinitives.

As I've said before [1], use of the present participle (gerund), rather  
than imperatives, in instructional titles, is just the way it's done.  
See any good technical book for an example.

[1]  
http://wordpress.org/pipermail/docs_wordpress.org/2004-December/ 
000998.html

> I hate to correct you here, but I maintain that we should not use
> "WordPress" extensively in the page or section titles/headings. If an
> example will speak louder than my common sense, try searching for the
> phrase "wordpress blog by email" in google, and the first result you
> get should be the relevant (old) wiki page which has the title "blog
> by email". The search engines are smart enough to read the "wordpress"
> in the page URL, even if readers or searchers are not, and so they
> automatically put the "wordpress" and the "blog by email" together to
> deliver the relevant page as the most appropriate response to the
> query "wordpress blog by email". Let us not make our page titles ugly
> by adding wordpress into them all.

Actually, in that example, the search engine is smart enough to read  
"WordPress" from "WordPress Wiki - How To Blog By Email", which is  
what's contained in the page's <title> tag.

I don't think we should be wasting our effort trying to cater page  
titles to search engine results: it's just a losing battle. Different  
people are inevitably going to search for different variations on  
words, and there's nothing we can appropriately do to catch them all in  
the page title. I think we should take the keyword route and not let  
the page titles ruin the usability of the site.

I agree that we shouldn't use "WordPress" extensively, but I also agree  
with Matthew Thomas that there are some circumstances where, for  
reasons of usability, it should be used. As an example, a quick glance  
through the TOC of my "Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell" book turns up  
five instances (out of a few hundred) of the product name showing up in  
the title: "Using Mac OS X", "Mac OS X Filesystems," "Running Services  
in Mac OS X," "Java on Mac OS X," and "Under Mac OS X's Hood." (Notice  
also how "Use Mac OS X" and "Run Services in Mac OS X" would sound  
extremely odd.)

Morgan