Designing decisions: links

I’ve been making a wordpress theme thinking about web design. So far I’ve written about heading hierarchy and page width.

As with any element, you can style links essentially any way you want to. Should you though?

I didn’t think it would be such a difficult decision, but I found myself searching the net for opinions on usability and readability of links.

Talking about links

This is what I found,

• Styling links gives an overview of the styling possibilities without imposing a strong opinion. I quite like the way he has styled his own inline links: the green is obviously different to the main text and when hovering the background becomes that same green – a rather pleasant colour actually.
• Styling links content is a response to the previous article. Part of the article demonstrates how underlines cut off the bottom of text. I like how his link colours match his theme nicely.
• Don’t be the weakest link provides an overview of both styling and using links. For example, using informative link text, possibly adding titles (tooltips) and using semantic html markup.
• Design guidelines for visualising links, by the usability guru Jakob Neilsen, presents a more balanced view than people seem to give him credit for. He seems to emphasise that links should be obvious; whether by colour or underlining or both. Reserve the style that you choose for links alone. Also, keep in mind the users, don’t make it difficult for people who are colourblind or can’t see well (such as elderly people).

Conclusions

Links should be,

• easy to identify by colour, underlining, or using a bottom border (borders don’t cut off the text, can be a different colour, can be dotted or dashed)
• different to visited links – readers expect visited links to be different, they might want to find it again, or find the links they haven’t visited yet
• different to text – don’t use the same colours or styles for non-link text

Do you agree? How do you expect to identify links when reading on the web?