As you start planning your website, it’s helpful to learn some of the language used in design work to help you understand just a few basics of site construction and building your brand.

IN THIS LESSON

In this video, we’ll discuss giving a page a name, how that creates the specific URL for any given page, and how you can add a description to a page to explain the name. We’ll also discuss taglines, their purpose, and the basics of best practice for tag lines.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello. Welcome to the video on Names, Titles, and Taglines. I wanted to spend just a couple of minutes talking about some of these words that we use when we're doing design work to help you have a sense of what we're talking about and to give you just a little heads up as you start to think about the construction of your website and what you want it to look like. First of all, I want to say that the descriptive words, names, and titles are often used interchangeably and it can be a little bit confusing. I spoke briefly about choosing a domain name and then adding a title to your website in my second video in this guide.

0:44 I'm going to just go over that quickly again. A domain name. Is the unique address that identifies your website. It's the URL. The website title is the label that you add, generally to the home page, that identifies your business and brand. And they (the domain name and title) can be very much the same or they can be slightly different. So using my website here as an example, my domain name is “ChacoWebWorks”. And I could clarify what my business name is, my legal business name, or if I wanted to be just slightly more descriptive — in the title. So I could add instead of, as you see here on this page, “ChacoWebWorks” again, I could add a title that is something like “Chaco Web Design and Education.” I could expand upon the domain name I chose. Clearly, they should be as similar as possible so that people can find you. But there is flexibility in changing the title given any domain name that you've chosen.

1:50 So let's talk about pages within a website. Each page that you create (that we create together) will have its own distinct URL. And as you create new pages on your site, you'll choose a name first for the page, and then your software, as you're filling out the form (the format of the page), will automatically create a title. And that page title is used in lots of different places, including the site navigation, the site map, the browser title bar, and in other ways. It's used for SEO (search engine optimization), and for creating search results. So when you're naming a page that's going to be in your menu, or submenu, you want the name to be simple—so that it works in your navigation.

2:44 An example of a name I chose for a page in my menu, could be the Projects page. So you see the page here in the menu. As I click on it, it'll pull up the page and you'll see the URL at the top. Which is https://www.chacowebworks.com/projects That's the URL. And the name that I gave it was this last piece, PROJECTS. As you’ll see, I've adjusted the title on the page just a bit. I've called it “MY PROJECTS” here in the text. And I've explained it further down.

3:33 Another example in this menu, I've chosen to name the page ABOUT. It's in the main menu. The URL is www.chacowebworks.com/about, and then I've chosen to explain my version of an “ABOUT PAGE” here in the text below that. So that is information on naming a page and then choosing a page title.

4:04 I also want to talk about Taglines, while we're talking about titles and names on a website. Taglines are considered the slogan for your business. A headline. And their job is simply to get someone's attention. So, taglines shouldn't be too wordy, or vague, or too clever. A tagline should summarize what you do, or the benefit of what you offer, in a short phrase or just a few words. The process of creating a tagline can be done in three steps: Start by describing your business in a few sentences, and then trim it down, and then trim it down some more. Remember that Taglines can change, and they really should change, as your business evolves. And they may go from being a “descriptive” phrase to an “aspirational” phrase as your business grows.

4:59 In the tutorial library, I'll go into greater detail about this and offer more examples. But you can see that for me, at least in the beginning, the tagline I've chosen for my business is: “Websites you can work on.” I started this process by describing in writing what I offer, and then I worked on distilling it down. You'll see that on this home page I then, after the tagline, am explaining what the tagline is and what it means. So I hope that's helpful. We'll move on to some other topics in the next couple of videos. Thanks.