According to Jakob Nielsen, who tests, teaches and observes website usability for a living, blog post titles should be clear and summarise the content succinctly. Jokes, puns and obscure references, as usually favoured by me, make it harder for people to use a weblog, thereby driving away readers. Therefore, from now on, I will (probably, usually) be writing clearer titles for my posts, just to see how that works out for me.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - This doesn't mean I'll stop the humour.
PPS - It just means that the connection between the title and the post won't be part of the joke.
3 comments:
I try to go with obscurity, actually. It fits with my nature.
Are you going to let some guy tell you how to write your blog posts? Because that could get to be very boring. I'd expect you to turn around and say 'Are you trying to tell me what to do' and then punch him in the nose. Metaphorically speaking.
Oh, sure, I like the obscurity approach, because it tickles me just right. I like to think of people saying "What the hell? ... Oh!" when they read the title and then understand it a bit later. It does present problems, however. If you read the article, you might change your mind, or you might not.
I read his column regularly because it's important for my work and it interests me. For people outside the software industry, it probably holds only a passing interest.
I've been using single lines from songs as my titles. More often than not it also serves as an accurate title, even if you don't know the song. And more often than not it's from a Chris de Burgh song.
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