Hypertext presentation
Metro Business has a piece today (reprinted from a Steve Johnson column in the Chicago Tribune), discussing presentation of hyperlinks.
Most sites show hyperlinked text in blue and underlined, but some just boldface the text that is your portal to someplace else. Or they use a different font color.
Within text, some links highlight a key phrase, others a verb, and many prefer the very literal, “for such-and-such an article go here,” with the “here” being the blue, underlined, linking word. Still others prefer that links live within graphic elements: a picture, a drawing, a logo. Sometimes you don’t know where a link is until you roll your mouse over the spot.
Hyperlink theory may seem like inside baseball, but the stakes are high. The ad revenues of many Web sites depend on how many times they can get you to put your mouse on a link and click it, thus spending more time within the site, racking up more page views, seeing more ads.
More than that, links are the very fabric of the Web. The easy connectivity they provide is what defined the Web and made it so popular. And the number and quality of a site’s links are what most search engines use to determine which ones they will display when you type a search term.
Yet there really is no standard link-presentation theory, no bible of Web style to lay it all out for people building their own blogs and designing their own Web sites.
It’s certainly true that there was a time when all links were underlined and blue. Visited links were purple. Make an HTML page without CSS or inline styles and they still are. Back when the Ultimate Band List or NCSA were cutting-edge design. Of course, back then we also thought the blink and marquee tags were novel, so what did we know?
But now web design has brought people with actual design skills to the table, and link presentation is not, nor should it be, uniform. Does anyone actually think Daring Fireball is better this way?
Steve Johnson touches on this, but it bears repeating — as long as visitors can tell a link is a link, the actual presentation of the link doesn’t matter much. Far more important is that the link text indicates what is being linked. Don’t just link the word “here”. Don’t link to several related sites by hyperlinking each word in a sentence (or, god forbid, each letter). This does far more to promote usability than some de facto hyperlink standard.
