Doesn’t everyone find it slightly annoying when a post is published without a title, with limited content, and without decent meta data? Imagine a newspaper splash without a headline! A blog post without a title can look a bit naked and provides little indication of what to expect and perhaps nothing to click on! We’ve deliberately hidden the title on this page by design and to make a point, not to make your life difficult. Such errors of omission are as bad as those of commission, if you’re publishing online, messing with your search engine findability (is that a word?) not just annoying the rare person that happens to read your piece.
Still, there are plenty of reasons why your page content may be a bit blank. For example you just like it that way, perhaps it expresses how you are feeling today. As a matter of fact blank pages are not at all unusual in printed texts, but they do usually have some significance, relating e.g. to the way that a book is bound.
Such pages may serve purposes ranging from place-holding to space-filling and content separation. Sometimes, these pages carry a notice such as, “This page [is] intentionally left blank.” Such notices typically appear in printed works, such as legal documents, manuals and exam papers, in which the reader might otherwise suspect that the blank pages are due to a printing error and where missing pages might have serious consequences.
Wikipedia Intentionally blank page.
There is even a dadaist (or is it situationist?) homage called predictably www.this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org
Ourlocality’s homage is this website: This page intentionally left blank
But for all other pages and posts remember to
- give your post/page a good descriptive title not too long but not too short – edit the slug if you change the title a few times to ensure your SEO is not impaired
- if you are advertising an event and have a poster to upload, wrap some words around the poster because google is lazy and won’t read it, and most people have images turned off on their email and mobile devices – so no one will find your event (especially if you missed out the title too)
- if you are using images (remember not to abuse copyright), give them decent descriptions, google has no idea what the intention of the use of a particular image is (context matters) and your description will help real people find it
- consider that your news may find its way to people by different means, e.g. a syndicated news feed or aggregator on someone else’s website or on a different device (e.g. an ancient mobile phone)
- use featured images, categories and tags, the latter always sparingly or you’ll make people think they are well and truly lost
- don’t use the header image as your advertising hoarding … the syndication features of wordpress won’t pick up the subtleties of your bold devious plan
- remember that the missing title will look odd if you’re creating menus or have a widget in the margin listing your stuff – unless you think you are really cool (nothing here)
- avoid using ourlocality as if it was facebook or twitter. OurLocality encourages long form, the longer the better and leave facebook/twitter for ephemeral stuff that isn’t important except for the next 15 minutes to 24 hours, after which few people will bother …
First Published May 30, 2014