Skip to content

chore(release): 2.16.1 — shorten home <title> to 'HCI & AI Research at UW'#1364

Merged
jonfroehlich merged 2 commits into
masterfrom
seo-home-title-uw
Jun 21, 2026
Merged

chore(release): 2.16.1 — shorten home <title> to 'HCI & AI Research at UW'#1364
jonfroehlich merged 2 commits into
masterfrom
seo-home-title-uw

Conversation

@jonfroehlich

@jonfroehlich jonfroehlich commented Jun 21, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Member

Summary

Cuts 2.16.1, a follow-up to the on-page SEO fixes that shipped in 2.16.0.

The home <title> shipped in 2.16.0 as:

HCI & AI Research at the University of Washington | Makeability Lab (~66 chars)

Google truncates titles around ~60 characters, so the lab name (our brand) risked being cut off in search results. This shortens the descriptive prefix to "at UW":

HCI & AI Research at UW | Makeability Lab (~41 chars)

Why this wording

  • Keeps the high-recall "HCI & AI" keywords — the canonical terms people search for an HCI/accessibility research lab (higher search volume than "Human-AI").
  • Stays well under the truncation limit, so | Makeability Lab always shows.
  • We don't lose the UW association: "University of Washington" still appears in the page's Organization JSON-LD (parentOrganization) and in the About body copy.

Changes

  • website/templates/website/index.html — title block prefix → HCI &amp; AI Research at UW.
  • website/tests/test_page_metadata.pytest_home_title_is_not_duplicated updated to assert the new title.
  • makeabilitylab/settings.py — bump ML_WEBSITE_VERSION to 2.16.1 + description.

Before / after (home <title>)

Title
Before (2.16.0) HCI & AI Research at the University of Washington | Makeability Lab
After (2.16.1) HCI & AI Research at UW | Makeability Lab

This is a <title>-only content change (no visible page layout change), so no UI screenshots apply.

Testing

python manage.py test website.tests.test_page_metadata --settings=makeabilitylab.settings_test — passes.

Deploy

Merging to master auto-deploys to test. Tag 2.16.1 to ship to prod.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

jonfroehlich and others added 2 commits June 21, 2026 14:11
Follow-up to the 2.16.0 SEO on-page fixes. The home <title> shipped as
"HCI & AI Research at the University of Washington | Makeability Lab" (~66
chars), which Google truncates. Shorten the descriptive prefix to "at UW"
so the full title stays well under the ~60-char display limit while keeping
the high-recall "HCI & AI" keywords. "University of Washington" still
appears in the page's JSON-LD and body copy, so the UW association holds.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@jonfroehlich jonfroehlich changed the title fix(seo): shorten home title to 'HCI & AI Research at UW' chore(release): 2.16.1 — shorten home <title> to 'HCI & AI Research at UW' Jun 21, 2026
@jonfroehlich jonfroehlich merged commit 5fbd4c9 into master Jun 21, 2026
3 checks passed
@jonfroehlich jonfroehlich deleted the seo-home-title-uw branch June 21, 2026 21:22
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

1 participant