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Your Text Links: Make Them All Look The Same
A Web Copywriting Tip by Nick Usborne
In the early days of the web, every text link was blue and underlined.
Even today, Google and eBay links are blue and underlined.
At Yahoo! and MSN, the links are blue, and become underlined at mouseover.
What’s the point? The point is that “blue and underlined” is the user’s default expectation when looking for links on a site they are visiting for the first time.
Remember, first-time visitors have to figure out how your site works, so they can get to the pages that interest them most. And one element in this learning process is to figure out what the text links look like.
If your text links are blue and underlined, you have nothing to worry about.
Everyone will know what they are.
If they are orange and underlined, it will take a new visitor a moment or two to figure out where the links are.
If your links are orange and not underlined, it will take them a littler longer.
And now we get into some murky territory.
On all too many sites there is no rhyme or reason to the appearance of text links. Some are underlined, some are not. Some are blue and some are not.
Some are bold and some are not. And so on.
In this last case, and there are plenty of sites like that, you are placing a huge burden on both your users and your final ROI.
When you’re not consistent in the appearance of your text links, you are making it significantly harder for new users to get to where they want and find what they want.
The web is a medium in which a user’s attention can vanish in an instant.
It’s up to us to figure out ways to minimize this “evaporation of attention”.
And one really simple thing we can do is make sure that our text links are immediately recognizable.
It’s not hard to do.
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