What is the title and description for in the head of a web page

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Course contents
SECTION: 4
Project 2: Bike Repair Website 6:12:48
SECTION: 6
Project 4: Bootstrap Yogurt Website 3:35:39

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Course info

128 lessons / 17 hours 5 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Daniel Scott and together we’re going to learn how to build professional responsive websites. which look good on mobiles, tablets and desktop screens.

We will build 4 sites together...
  • a simple but elegant restaurant website.
  • a bike repair website. 
  • a responsive portfolio website.
  • a Bootstrap website.  

We cover everything you need to build your first website. From creating your first page through to uploading your website to the internet. We’ll use the world’s most popular (and free) web design tool called Visual Studio Code.

There are exercise files you can download and then work along with me. At the end of each video I have a downloadable version of where we are in the process so that you can compare your project with mine. This will enable you to see easily where you might have a problem.

We will delve into all the good stuff such as how to create your very own mobile burger menu from scratch learning some basic JavaScript and jQuery. 

 You will...
  • Learn how to work with responsive images and icons. and stunning full screen background images and probably one too many gradients. 
  • Learn how to create forms and to choose great fonts for your website. 
  • Learn how to work with Bootstrap 4 to easily add carousels, cards and complex looking menus. 
  • Setup a domain name with hosting so that your website is live on the internet for others to see.  

There are fun class projects for you to work on which will enable you to practice what you learn. By the end of this course you’ll have a great understanding of important web design topics like HTML5, CSS3, Flex box, Responsive design and Bootstrap.   

If that all sounds a little too fancy - don’t worry, this course is aimed at people new to web design and who have never coded before. We’ll start right at the beginning and work our way through step by step. 

Who am I? 

I’m Dan, and I’ve been building websites for about 15 years now. I am award winning instructor, and have won a MAX Master award for the last 2 years in a row at the prestigious Adobe Max conference.

Time to upgrade yourself?
Sign up for the course and let’s learn how to build responsive websites.

Course duration 16 hours 42 mins
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

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Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files Download Completed Files

Transcript

Hey there, this video we're going to learn what the Title is, in your Head Tag, and we're going to look at what a Description is. The very short version is, in Google search results, that is the title, that is the description. We need to add it to every page. Let's jump in now, I'll show you how to add it, what the pros and cons, what you should do, shouldn't do. Let's get started. 

All right, so let's start with the Title Tag. So this gets added to the top of every page, in the head. Ours got added there automatically by VS code. So what is it? It is a way to describe what's on the page. So this word ‘document’ here is just a placeholder. You can type anything in here. You'll notice though, it's not really code language, you can write ampersands, and you can write, brackets, and all sorts of things. Could be anything you want to write in here. You don't want it to just be anything. Let's say, this is one of, kind of thought that really describes this page. It's 'Learning HTML description and title tags'. That's going to really describe the page I'm trying to build here. 

Now if I save it and I go out to Chrome let's see where it appears. So, Chrome, there's the document that I'm working on. You can see the word 'document' there. That was from earlier on, before we've replaced it. If we hit 'Refresh', you can see, that's where it kind of ends up, that's your Title Tag. It ends up in the tab, but that's not that exciting, right? 

What's really important is, where that gets used by Google, and its search results. Remember, we did this search earlier on for underlining in HTML. We did that search. See these chunks of blue text here. These chunks of blue text are the Title Tags. So whatever you write in there will appear in this little list. So you can imagine, if you lift it as document, first of all the word, document, Google's just not going to list your page, because it's too vague, and there's probably a million pages online with the heading Document. So you need to make it unique for every page, which is a bit of a pain. 

So if you've got 20 pages on your website, you need 20 different Title Tags for each page. And it needs to really describe what's in that page. It's about 50 characters. You can see, some of them get a little bit longer, some of them are shorter, but be really concise and exact about what's in the page. Don't call it, like Home page. If it was me, for my site, mine is called 'Web Design Tutorials by Daniel Scott'. Would be a good Home page Title Tag for me. So that's the Title Tag. 

The other tag you should add, and it's not there by default, and very common, just underneath, is adding the description. So what is the description, before we make it, it's this chunk. That there is the title, that there is just your website address. This thing here, you have control over. You can tell Google what to put in this description. Sometimes it ignores it but most of the time it won't, it will list it here. This is a bit more marketing than it is--

Like this one here, be really concise, really good keywords that really describe what you're doing. Down here is kind of like, we all know it, right, when we're doing a result, that we search, we check that to make sure you're kind of in the right ballpark. Then you use this just to confirm that you are, you know, you get more into the details, and just kind of-- just checking you're in the right sort of zone. This is where it's more marketing than it is, let's say, coding. 

So down in here let's add the Meta Description. By default it's not in there, because you can't survive without a title, but you can survive without a description, but in my opinion you should definitely add it. This is where it's kind of some ugly syntax, but you type it up once with me now, and later on you can just come back and copy and paste this one. So it's called a Meta name. You need to add all that syntax. I'm just using the shortcuts that appear, via VS code, but you need name, equals, and you need the quote marks. And inside of here, this one's called Description. It needs to be spelled exactly like that. And we need the name as description. 

The content is going to be what you want that description to be. So this is where you get to put-- so in here you want about 100, between 120 characters, or 150 characters. So 120 is what generally will appear in mobile results, and 150 on desktop. You can see here, this one here got given quite a big chunk, whereas this one got cut off quite small, so this one is going to go really small. 

Meta Description, sometimes as well, doesn't matter how long you make it, Google will cut it off. So make sure all your good stuff is at the beginning of that paragraph. Just make it one, and make it about 120 characters. Now the one thing for this is, it kind of brings up a good point. Can you see this little-- this guy's gone red. If I save this, and let's view the page, let's refresh it. It's gone a bit crazy, it's like, hmm, what? That was in the Head tag, why is it displaying down here in the body? It's because we forgot to close out this Meta description tag. I say we, me. 

So it has an opening there, and can you see, all of them have this closing angle brackets. So at the end here, closing angle brackets, you'll see the red disappears, and back here, 'Refresh'. Oh, it's back to normal. So if you ever have red stuff, bad. Often you'll notice the difference when you get into previewing in Chrome, it will kind of show you, everything will go haywire. 

All right, that is the Meta Title. Meta description, copy and paste that into a notepad, so you've got it handy for when you're doing it next time. So you don't have to type it out every time. Really essential to pages. Let's get on to the next video.
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