Everyone knows that underlined text is a link, right? Well, from my highly unscientific study of my clients, nope. I’ve run into quite a few people that don’t realize a link is a link until I point it out, not the best result when you’re going for usability. One solution is to make sure links look like buttons, but I can’t always do that when I’m embedding a link in text. Adding the words ‘click here’ can help, but…
Everyone knows you should never put the words ‘click here’ in your link, right? It’s redundant, and doesn’t tell the visitor anything about what they’re going to get when they click the link. I’d read that so often that my knee-jerk reaction was to automatically delete the words ‘click here’ from the text my clients gave me. Then I started to think about the problem of visitors not realizing that nicely underlined text is a link.
Now I’ve come to a compromise. I do put in the words ‘click here,’ but I move them to the end of the end of the link text. Usually my client hands me text with the link written something like this: click here to read the study. I’ll change that to: to read the study on clowns in colleges, click here, usually making the link start at ’study on clowns in colleges.’ so the visitor can scan and pick that out. If they don’t know that it’s a link, those magic words, ‘click here,’ are part of the link text.
I’m curious about what other web guys do. Seems like this is an area that’s the bread and butter of web pages (hyperlinks) but it’s not super sexy like css hacks or box model bugs, so it doesn’t get much discussion.
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