As well as text for the content of the site, you also need to decide on navigational text such as section names, story titles, etc. This is important because users need to understand it so they know what to click on to get to a relevant story.
Clarity over cleverness
You might have ideas for clever section names - using puns, or basing your site around some kind of bizarre metaphor.
This isn't a good idea for most sites:
- Users want to get to their information quickly and easily, not have to try every single option to find where it might be.
- The Web is international, and foreign users might have difficulty understanding non-literal text; it's vitally important that they can at least follow the navigation.
On some entertainment sites, the use of metaphor might be appropriate (for example a film web site might have a section where you can watch trailers; this could be called "screening room" rather than "trailers"). Even here, though, it's questionable unless the metaphor is fairly clear; the entertainment is supposed to be the site's content, not some hide-and-seek game to find it.
Brevity
Section names and other link titles often need to be very short. Even if they don't need to be short, it's usually good practice to keep them so.
There isn't a magic way to achieve this, although you can begin by removing all words that don't add to the meaning (for example particles like "the"). You can see examples of the technique in newspaper headlines.
If you really can't compress a title enough to fit in the available space, you might have to resort to using abbreviations. Hopefully, when this is necessary, you can also include the full version of the title for use everywhere that it will fit.
