The occasional light expression

While browsing through the plethora of job sites in India, I noticed something that bothered me. Despite paying much attention to their homepage layouts, banners, and in some cases, even usability, most of the job sites catering to Indian professionals had pretty insipid, commonplace, arbitrary TITLE text. Most of the website titles had common phrases such as - ‘jobs’, ‘india’, ‘bangalore’, ‘chennai’, ‘pune’, ’search for jobs online’….

Now page titles are probably not the most interesting piece of virtual real estate, but couldn’t most of these companies pay a little attention to how similar they all look if they are opened next to each other in a tabbed browser? Why couldn’t the keywords be a little more enterprising, a little more descriptive, a little more differentiating? How did all the smart website designers and usability professionals miss such a small thing?

I find it odd that a well designed homepage could have an ‘HTML META ‘or an ‘HTML Tag Refresh’ listed as the page title. Shouldn’t Venture Capitalists or Private Equity analysts, those finance Gods who raise billions of dollars to fund or buy or sell these sites pay attention to how much attention their client (or their designer) pays to design detail?