Route planner Mappy had a strange message for me last week.
What do you mean, this route is not available?
Has the road gone missing?
Was it destroyed by an earthquake?
A tsunami?
Has it been temporarily moved to a parallell universe?
Help!
The description tag is a piece of html code that’s meant to give a short – you guessed it – description of a web page. The description tag is at the top of the page in the <HEAD>section of the code.
In code, a description tag looks like this:
<meta name="description" content="Short, riveting description of your web page." />
The description tag of a web page is not visible on the page itself. That’s why a lot of companies don’t pay it much attention.
Google likes the description tag. If a web page has a description tag, Google shows it, provided these 2 conditions are met:
Example 1
I looked for ‘title tag’. Google shows the page’s description tag because it contains my query ‘title tag’.
Example 2
I looked for ‘page title’. Because the description tag does not contain my query, Google doesn’t show it. Instead, Google shows a sentence fragment on the page that does contain the query.
Some more answers to frequently asked questions about the description tag
10 years ago I thought so. More specifically: I thought I knew everything.
Surely my usability expertise, my deep knowledge of information architecture would be enough to find and solve all the usability issues on every possible website?
10 years of user testing have made me a bit more modest. Okay, a lot more modest. Expert knowledge alone is not enough.
Does that mean I’m not a good usability expert? Hell no. I think I know more about web usability and information architecture than anyone else in Belgium. (Non-Belgian readers, please suppress that giggle.) Actually, that’s a lie: Els knows more about it than I do. See, I told I you I was modest.
And still, despite all of our combined expertise, we often say things like ‘That depends’, ‘We’ll have to ask your customers that’ or ‘We’ll have to test that’.
Why is expertise not enough when it comes to usability?
The great thing about a content management system (CMS) is that it makes it really easy to create and publish content on your website.
So that’s what most webmasters and editors do: they create and publish content like there’s no tomorrow.
Cause it’s fun. And it’s what they’re being paid to do.
They’re often judged on the amount of content they produce. The number of pages and articles they put online. A nice and easy box to tick during the annual evaluation talk.
If you’re responsible for the quality of your company’s website, your main task should not be publishing new content. You should be managing and improving the content you’ve already got.
It’s less fun than creating new content. But it’s vital if you want to have a website that works.
It’s like Gerry McGovern says: “You’re not being paid to have fun. You’re being paid to run a good website.”
6 essential questions and tasks for a content manager
A little while ago, we talked about 8 tips for the perfect title tag.
Which provides us with a good excuse to also show you some examples of what not to do.
The title tag determines the name of a web page. Title tags are mostly visible in Google and in the browser.
Google
The page title Google shows is a page’s title tag. The same goes for Bing.
Browser
The title tag appears in the browser title bar and the browser tabs. When you add a page to your favorites or when you share a page via social media, the title tag is what apppears as the page title.
You bet it is. The title tag is one of the most important things to get right if you want to do well in Google. It’s not the only thing but if you neglect your title tags you’re making it very hard on yourself.
8 tips for the perfect title tag
You’re probably thinking that should be a statement instead of a question. Well… yes, the customer is king. And no, he isn’t really.
One of the main reasons a lot of websites fail to deliver is because they’re made according to the specifications of the company that ordered it. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good for a web builder or usability expert to find out what the customer wants. But it’s not enough.
We tell most of our customers at the start of a usability project that it doesn’t really matter all that much what they think or want.
What we think doesn’t matter that much either.
You don’t make a company’s website for that company. You make it for that company’s customers.
Their needs and expectations are what matters. A website can only be truly successful if it caters to the needs of its visitors, not to the needs of its owners or makers.
Finding out what visitors want is crucial if you want to base your functional analysis and information architecture on facts rather than feelings.
Yeah, right.
How can you find out what your customer's customers want?
If you’re offering 2 or more similar products or services, people should be able to compare them easily.
It’s the vendor’s job to help people pick the product that suits their needs best. That’s what people expect, offline as well as online.
We’ve written about this before in ‘4 product comparison best practices’.
A typical problem in product comparisons is that differences between products aren’t immediately apparent.
First Choice Power is a good example of a site that doesn’t tell people what the difference is between products but makes them look for it.
What’s the difference between Simply Better Price Plan 24 and Simply Better Price Plan? The description is pretty much identical.
On closer inspection I can tell the first one’s a 24 month plan and the other one’s a 12 month plan. They both promise a ‘guaranteed low price’. Is it the same price for the 24 month plan as for the 12 month plan? I have no idea.
More examples of do's and don'ts
Photographers know that the eye gaze direction of the person in a picture dictates the eye gaze direction of the person who’s looking at the picture. It’s in just about every book on photography ever published.
If you use pictures of people on your website, make sure they’re looking at something you want your visitors to look at as well.
Pictures of people looking straight into the camera bounce the viewer’s gaze right back. Sure, they draw people’s attention. But that in itself really doesn’t do anything for you, does it? Unless of course you prefer people to look at the pictures on your site rather than the ‘Buy now’ button. If that’s how you roll, be my guest.
3 examples to convince you
These 10 articles were the most popluar ones over the past year. It’s a good mix of what we try to write on this blog: serious articles and less serious stuff, facts as well as meandering thoughts, good tips and bad examples. Thanks for reading them!
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