Back in the middle 1970s, Honda came to market with their first Accord. It was a nice-enough little car, really. You could get it with a standard manual transmission, you could get it with a two-speed automatic. You could get it in a four-door sedan, or a three-door hatchback. And you could get it in six or eight colors. And as I said, these were nice little cars. You got carpeting. You got cloth seats. You got a rear-window defroster.
But I'm convinced that what really sold a lot of Accords was the little coin drawer in the dash. Every Honda Accord came with a little flap, a lid over on the left side of the instrument panel labeled coins. And when you opened that lid, there was a fuzzy indentation just large enough to store a couple dollars worth of dimes and nickels and pennies for parking meters, tolls, etc. You could not get these on $10,000 Cadillacs of the day, but you could get them on Honda Accords.
They asked Honda once, how much extra the car cost by including that and he chuckled saying that it was very, very little, really. "Including features like the coin tray and rear-window defogger cost very little, when you apply them to every car you build." It was enough to sway people away from a lot of other cars of the time, and launched the Accord on a thirty-year journey atop the sales charts every year.
We can do something like this ourselves, building Web pages. The W3C includes, in their design specification for HTML, an attribute named Title, which we can use to impart brief bursts of information to our page visitors. Most commonly, we see Title used with Anchor tags, links. When a visitor hovers her mouse over the Link Text, a brief "tool tip" -style window opens, explaining where the link goes or what it does, etc.
This is different from the title tag. The title tag appears only once on a page, in the head of your page, and names the page for search engines and browser bookmarks. The title attribute can be assigned to HTML elements and cause information to appear briefly on screen, helping your users to understand your page.
Including this feature is shamefully inexpensive. It takes maybe twelve or fifteen seconds to include it in a link. It really is a very little thing. But it conveys a lot of information and no small measure of comfort, to your users. People like knowing what's going on. They like knowing where they are and where they're going. Including a brief message on every link explaining what it is and where it's taking you, or why, or how, is a good habit to get into.
Dreamweaver provides an easy way to enter Title information, at the time you are building your link. The text you place in the Title: window is what will appear briefly whenever a user hovers over the link. It's a great way to explain what would happen if someone clicked, why they should or shouldn't or answer any other questions you might anticipate someone having at that moment. Nobody should ever be surprised by anything that happens on one of your Web pages. Nobody should ever find themselves on another Web site, without knowing it was going to happen. The same goes for opening new browser windows, launching media players and downloading files. Let 'em know. It's a little thing and it means so much. What happens when someone clicks on this link? It could be anything, and that's quite daunting to people, sometimes. Let them know what to expect! (You can, of course, hover over the linked text "this link" above, and see where it goes before clicking, and decide whether or not to click based on that information.)Titled text is read aloud by screen reader equipment to describe the link to people who may not be able to see it. And there is evidence to suggest it also figures into search engine scores, as well. There are a lot of benefits, and there is very little cost involved. So it makes you wonder: Why don't more Web developers include Title attribute text in their pages? Why don't you?
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