I second Joe’s request; thanks for your article and follow-up comment. I was trying to achieve similar results by creating a new Wordpress template, but that required me to go into The Loop in header.php merely to hack together a makeshift title. Your solution would affect all templates, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

There’s one drawback to putting the document title ahead of your site title: you may not be able to see the site title in Google. Observe. Right now, part of my overly long post title is not displayed, but with your method my site title would disappear. Overall it’s no big deal—the post title is more important—but just think of how panicked greedy Search Engine Optimizers would be!

<title>sitename</title>
<subtitle>extra description</subtitle>

The advantage: If you run a site with articles and such you could use just the title and put everything inthere. However if you have a site where the sitename is important, but the extra info might change from time to time you could use subtitle to do so. Also would this make a decent way to bookmark sites, instead of ‘title- welcome to our website, hope you enjou etc…’ it makes for ugly bookmarks.

So i’m not quite done by how it should be implemented but i know it has the benefits if used/implemented right.

You could change the titles by editing “template-functions-general.php” in the “wp-includes” directory. Look for a function called “wp-title” and then for the comment “// Send it out”.

That’s what the part of my file looks like:

// Send it out
if ($display && isset($title)) {
echo "$title $sep ";
} elseif (!$display && isset($title)) {
return "$title $sep ";
}

$title is the title and $sep is a seperator you can define in the WordPress index.php file.