Easier and better linking

Written on February 3rd 2008, filed under Usability with 0 comments.

Links are the lifeblood of the internet. They’re a reference to more relevant information for a user, but, there’s a catch: that information is only relevant and available when the user knows it’s there. This is why it’s so important to style links in a way that they get noticed and why it’s so odd to see so many sites that don’t follow conventions. Making links more useful for your visitors isn’t a hard thing to do; in fact, it’s easy and pretty straight forward.

Make sure that you use a descriptive link text that’s long enough. Usability studies have shown that the larger an object is, the easier it becomes to click it. Using a descriptive link text has the advantage that the user knows what the page the link points to will be about, and because of that so will search engine spiders. Avoid the use of meaningless text like “click here” or “read more”.

An example: Avoid using “Click here for a tutorial on better 404 pages.” when you can rewrite that text to read “Also read a tutorial on better 404 pages”.

One of the very first conventions of the modern internet was to underline links. In fact, underlined text is so strongly associated with links that it’s better not to use it for anything else. There’s no better way to indicate that something is a link then by using an underline.

Use a different; contrasting color for your links than the one you use for regular text, this will make them pop out. Don’t forget to give visited links a different color by using the “:visited” pseudo-class, this will save users from getting some frustration by visiting a page they’ve already been to or from having to search for the link they’ve already clicked on. Make sure that you use a font size that’s large enough.

You can give the user some more information about the link by using the “title” attribute. For example, you can let him know that he’s leaving your site or give a little bit more of information about what’s on the page that you’re linking to.

Unless you’re linking to a non-html document (a PDF file comes to mind) don’t force a new window when opening links. You’ll break the back button and annoy and confuse users. Think about it: what’s easier and more natural? Closing a window (which means it’s gone forever), or using the back button to return to a site?