Need help with TITLE and META description tags

trying to please search engines, site visitors and site developers

[griz_fan]

I'm in the process of re-working a fairly large commerce site (tens of thousands of different product display pages dyanmically generated from a handfull of templates). One area I hope to address is our implementation of the TITLE tag and the META description tag. I'd like these two tags to help improve our search engine rankings, but I'd also like to make sure I've done all I can to provide the best description of a particular page on a search results page. High rankings are nice, but if the results displayed don't give people an accurate idea of the content of the page, I'm worried I'll loose potential traffic. In addition, I'd like to make sure our customers' bookmark links have a good description.
Currently, our META descriptions are simply a duplicate of each page's title tag. Our current title tags look something like this:
widget supplies from MyWidget.com - Blue widget product line
or:
widget supplies from MyWidget.com - details specs for size 2 light-blue wideget

Should each page have different content for the title tag vs. the META description tag? What is a good length for each? Would I be better off switching to a format like:
details specs for size 2 light-blue wideget - widget supplies from MyWidget.com

Finally, are there any good threads or resources discussing the relationship between title tags, meta description and how your site is displayed in search results?

[tedster]

You've covered a lot of territory there. I'll take on a bit of it - the Title tag.

The title tag serves a number of functions, and often you need to make some priority decisions and trade-offs between:

1. Search engine algorithms
2. Recognizability when bookmarked
3. Clarity when appearing in a browser tab
4. Branding for the business

I give branding for the business no consideration except for top level pages. When it comes to individual product pages, getting the specific prodcut name/model number and perhaps a qualifying word or two (color, extra feature, etc) is about all that makes sense to me. I don't want anything do dilute the presence of those KEY words, and that includes the domain name and marketing hype.

I aim for 3 to 5 words in a title tag, 7 at a stretch.

Getting some company branding into a bookmark means very little - and if it pushes the product page lower in a search return, then it has a negative effect. I let the favicon do the branding for a bookmark.