The page title is a field in the page HEAD area that tells the browser what to put in the title bar in the window in which it displays the page.
The first rule in choosing a title is that it be concise. Any title that's more than a few words will not fit into the window title bar and will have to be truncated or visually compressed or in some other way distorted. If you want a long title for your page, put it in the first H1 heading in the page, and put a more concise version in the title.
The second crucial thing to note about titles is that the title is the text that the browser saves as a page description when a user creates a bookmark. To see how this impacts on the choice of titles, take a look at your bookmark list now. If you're like me, you'll have bookmarked hundreds of pages and will have a long list of bookmarks in your bookmark menu. If you look at the list carefully, you'll find that the names that are the most help are those that convey the higher-level identity of the page. A title such as "Rocksoft Icons" is of far more assistance than just "Icons". Unfortunately, it's very easy to fall into the trap of creating generic titles because when you're webauthoring a page deep in your web, it's natural to assume that the user already knows where they are!
Another thing that happens is that a user might save a bookmark to several pages in one of your subwebs. If this happens, and your page titles all have a strictly local meaning (e.g. "Icons", "Buttons") then there will be no way for the user to associate the related bookmarks in the bookmark list.
For these reasons, I advocate that for each web, you choose an
identifier and use it as a prefix in every page in the web. The identifier
for this subweb is WebHints and you'll see that it's the
prefix for most of the titles of the pages in this web.
Webmaster: ross@ross.net