Times Union adds relevant titles

Times Union adds relevant page titles to most of thier articles

Hot on the heels of the Times Union (TU) dropping its online registration requirement they add relevant page titles to most of thier news articles. Because I asked them to. Yes that’s right, I asked and they did it.

This impressed me almost enough to subscribe to the paper, almost. I have to give the TU credit for listening to thier readers and making the effort to create a better online experience.

In the past when you read a story on Jacksonville.com the page title, the text that appears at the top of your browser, would simply say Jacksonville.com: News. The problem with this is the information is not useful. I wrote a post on the nGen Works blog detailing the reasons why less-than-descriptive titles were hurting the TU and their readers:

The TU page titles are completely useless and a waste of bandwidth in their current state. Instead of:

Jacksonville.com: News

why not?

Jacksonville.com: News: Easier access to our Web site

This simple change will make each page on the TU site more relevant to search engines and it will improve the user experience.

No less than 6 hours later the TU fixed this issue. Now most of the articles on Jacksonville.com have relevant titles. So, if you are having an issue with the Times Union online, talk to them, they are listening.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 6:40 am and is filed under Activism, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.