One of the routine annoyances of browsing the web is encountering page titles that link to the same page. See Customer Experience Matters for an example.
Note that the title is a link to the same page. Incidentally, Customer Experience Matters is a great blog which I thoroughly recommend.
Customer Experience Matters is hosted by WordPress.com and uses the Regulus theme. Regulus is a very smart theme, and the author has published some excellent plugins (so I’m certainly not criticising the blog or the theme author).
What’s so annoying about these links?
Well, it’s not going to ruin your day encountering a title that links to the same page, but:
- users expect to go to a new place when they click a link. At least page anchors lead to another place within the same document; these type of links don’t lead anywhere new at all
- copying and pasting a title that’s also a link requires some manual dexterity (as I found out when tweeting the Customer Experience Matters page; I ended up clicking the link accidentally)
- there may be an SEO issue (at least, Chris was wondering about it). Headings that are links are perhaps viewed as links to other pages rather than actual headings
Fixing the problem
In WordPress, it’s pretty trivial. In single.php look for the page title; it’ll probably look like: <h1><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>. You need to remove the hyperlink, so something like <h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1> would do it.
Like I say, it’s more a tut tut than a huge usability issue, but these small annoyances can accumulate to create a frustrating user experience.
What do you reckon? And what’s your pet website peeve?