How a site presents its links is one easiest things to get right on a website, but also one of the most important!
If a user can’t find the links on your site, how are they ever going to use your site? How are they going to browse, or buy, your products and services if they can’t move off of the page?! It sounds obvious, but a lot of sites fail this most fundamental of tests.
I’m not even talking about sites’ navigation systems – that would be a whole separate article – but the in-page links that a site provides. The rules here are very simple:
- Underline your links, and nothing but your links
- Make your links a different colour to the rest of your text.
Even though these rules are laughably simple, you would be surprised how many supposedly ‘professionally-designed’ websites break them!
Designers often think that underlined links ‘look ugly’, and therefore opt for simply colouring them slightly differently in the belief that users will notice them.
Now, call me cynic if you will, but I’m not going to rely on a designer’s faith to insure that users can find information on my company’s products and services! Behaviour like this is a classic example of designers designing for other designers, not the end-user.
What if the end-user has less than perfect eyesight and can’t tell the difference between your link and regular text colours? Do you not want anyone’s money who isn’t a 23 year-old art school drop out?!
That said, designers do have a appoint when they say that too much underlined text looks ugly – i.e. it is confusing to the eye. But that is no reason to not underline your links; it’s just a reason to more carefully consider the design of your links.
By the ‘design of your links’, I mean the words that you actually use as a link. I would always recommend using the least number of information carrying words possible.
For instance:
- Click here for more details on our products and services
- Click here for more details on our products and services
- Click here for more details on our products and services
Of these options, I would choose Option 2, because the link tells you what it is providing access to (i.e. ‘products and services’).
Option 1 underlines everything, which is overkill and Option 3 underlines words that have no relevance to the actual page the user will be click through to (a particular problem with blind/partially-sighted users who use screen-reading technology to read out the link – imagine having 8 ‘click here’ links per page – how would you ever tell the difference?!).
So, in summary – designing links is easy as long as you:
- Underline them;
- Make them a special colour (preferably blue, as it’s the standard);
- Use short information-carrying words/phrases.
Safe linking!