For a brief time, I used the same color for my links and visited links. BAD move. I didn’t realize how much I relied on visited link colors until I went to a Web site that didn’t give visited links a unique color. As you know visited links let users know they’ve already been there. It helps in two situations:
- You want to find a document you had already seen before — visited links narrow that down.
- You’re checking out links on a Web page and need to know which ones you’ve already seen so you don’t go to them again.
Styling links discusses the appearance of links. It prompted this post as I started recalling some of the link problems I’ve run into, which the following lists:
- Lack of color differentiation: I receive a newsletter from a nonprofit organization, which always contains links. When the newsletter received a new design, the links turned green with no underline. Just using color can work, but here … it was hard to distinguish the olive green links from the dark brown text. I e-mailed them and they added underlines. Much better.
- Confusion between clickable and non-clickable links: Some sites use the same color in the headers as they do for the links. However, the “links” aren’t links, but rather attention-getting phrases or highlighting points. Be careful when using colors that match headers and other text that aren’t links.
- Visited links don’t have a color to stand out from other links: Already explained.
- Incorrect use of the “new window” icon: I got confused about whether these icons meant a link outside of the current site or if the link opens in a new window. The reason is that there isn’t a consistent use of this icon. That’s where standards help. We need to have some standards that represent user expectations that something is going to do what it should do.
Linked text is another story.
What problems have you run into with links?