Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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Apple’s homepage is used as an example, since its title is simply “Apple”, but other pages at Apple’s site are named fairly inconsistently: some use curly apostrophes, others use straight ones. Some have sentences ending in periods; others don’t. Some use sentence case; others use title case. Some pages just state what the page is; others read like marketing babble.

Examples:

Apple

Welcome to the Apple Store – Apple Store (U.S.)

Apple – Mac

Apple – Play music and more on iPod.

Apple – iPhone 4 – Video calls, multitasking, HD video, and more

Apple – iPad – See the web, email, and photos like never before.

Apple – iTunes – Everything you need to be entertained

Apple – Support

iPad – iPad WiFi – iPad Wifi + 3G – Apple Store (U.S.)

Apple – MacBook Air – It thinks and acts like a full-size Mac.

Apple – iPod classic – Read the iPod classic technical specifications.

Apple – iPhone 4 – Design of the display, A4 processor, and more

Apple – iTunes – What's on – Discover music, movies, and more.

Apple – Why You’ll Love a Mac – A Mac is the ultimate upgrade.

Apple – In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic for iPod and iPhone

Apple – Science – Inside the Image – Quantum Views

(Still, overall, Apple’s is better than most websites: it’s pretty clear what each of the above pages is about just from its title.)

You should see Google products. Matt Cutts did a Google SEO 101 audit and released the results once. Suffice it to say that a bunch of intelligent engineers given mostly-free reign over their development roadmaps do not necessarily converge on a consistent, competent onpage SEO strategy. (Not mentioned in the audit, but equally true: if you work at Google, you can do everything wrong and still rank fine, because your projects will have more link equity than God. Plus, if Google desires to give you more prominent billing on the Internet, there are very easy ways of making that happen.)

What, Gruber used an overly selective example from Apple to prove some point while subtly asserting their superiority? No way!

Or, he just looked around at a few major website homepages, and used them as examples of decent titles. Gruber’s example did a fine job illustrating his point, I thought – I just found it interesting that even Apple, a company known for its fastidious care for such trivial details, has inconsistent titles across its sprawling website(s), and found the inconsistencies themselves interesting, because they illustrate slightly different approaches to writing titles by the different teams creating the pages. To be honest, I find your sarcasm entirely unhelpful to this discussion.

I apologize for the snark. It was directed at Gruber, not your post. I'm actually glad you pointed out the incompleteness of his example, and the frustration of my post stemmed from how most forget to look for this in every other line of Gruber's writings and suck down the subtle shilling without thinking about it.

This is evidence that Apple is not focused on web based organic growth. And why would/should they?

They have great marketing... mostly from the consumer.

Yes, file your evidence away for when the trial of "web-based-organic-growth" Vs. Apple inc begins.

Great, so if you have a bunch of shrunken tabs, you just see "Apple" over and over. Usability experts have said for years to put the subject first in the page title and then tack on branding afterward if you must.

Safari actually handles this case intelligently -- it dynamically removes overlapping prefixes from tab titles. Looks like neither Chrome or Firefox do the same.

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