Conveying website hierarchy using page title. Any conventions?

Question

I was thinking of using a format like:

[SpecificPageName - ]SiteName - SectionName

• StackOverflow - Download
• StackOverflow - Contact
• StackOverflow - Forum
  • hey guys my 1st post - StackOverflow - Forum
  • this site has nice titles - StackOverflow - Forum

However, I don't really see the last two examples used anywhere. Apple sometimes uses a : to signify a specific page in section:

• hey guys my 1st post: StackOverflow - Forum

But the use of a : eeks me out a bit. Anyone know a good convention for this?

Answer 1

I like to use the more logical [page] - [category] - [site] format because it is organized in order of reverse magnitude (the exact reverse of what we use for numerals and the international date format).

In a less pragmatic world I'd go with [site] - [cat] - [page] but that leads to being unable to read the page title from the browser because it is cut off much too soon.

Depending on the size of the site, I'd also suggest leaving out the category all together. This is especially true if your site has a global unique page name rule (as is the case with many Wiki type sites). If the page name is already unique, further organization is redundant and gets in the way when people just want to know the title of the article.

EDIT: Also, I forgot to mention that the best seperator is the dash (-) because it matches the seperator used by most (if not all) browsers. For example, in the title bar of all pages viewed in Chrome the title will always end with ' - Chrome' or ' - Chromium', etc..

Answer 2

Personally, I quite like a [page] | [category] | [site] convention.

I think putting the page subject first has some advantages for people looking through their favourites menu. The subject of the page is probably more helpful than the site's name, especially if they have several favourites on the same site, so (in languages read left to right) the page name being first thing on the left seems ideal.

This convention also automatically gets important key terms into your page's <title>. For instance, a page on oranges in the fruit category of Bob's Fruit & Veg:

Jaffa Oranges | Fruit | Bob's Fruit & Veg

You might also expand the convention to include sub-categories.

The word separator is a matter of preference. I like the pipe (|), some go for hyphen (–), some get creative (.:.).