One of the things that I am particularly passionate about is usability. Not just web usability, either (it pains me, all the controls I have to hit to demist my windscreen.) This is the first in what I hope will be a long line of boring posts about making the world a better place for humans to live in.

Firstly, title case is the capitalisation used in titles. Effectively it involves capitalising all “significant” words. The reason is that it makes titles easy to scan quickly. This is especially important on the web, where the vast amount of information available (and highly variable quality) means a whole lot of skimming takes place. Correct use of title case could actually help you get more hits – consider Google search results.

I can never remember which words to capitalise. This post will serve as a handy reference. In general, capitalising the first word and everything apart from words like “a”, “the”, “of” and “and” is close enough. What I want to emphasise is that doing this does matter. The little things that no one really notices can be more important than you might think.

In title case do not capitalise:

Articles

“a”, “an” and “the”

Conjunctions

“and”, “or”, etc.

Prepositions

above, about, across, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, by, down, during, except, for, from, in, inside, into, like, near, of, off, on, since, to, toward, through, under, until, up, upon, with and within.

Finally, if you want to display your titles as all upper or all lower case, use CSS to do it instead, like so:

h1 { text-transform: uppercase; }