/CSS/ Making the most of links

22/06/2007 | Filed under Develop > CSS

Utilise CSS to make your website links look much more appealing, while simultaneously enhancing the usability of your site. Craig Grannell explains all...

Although the web has enabled mediums such as text, music, video, animation, and so on, to coexist within a single interface (a web browser), the one thing that sets it apart from everything else is the hyperlink. Enabling users to rapidly access related information by clicking text is amazing, though most users take this wonderful innovation for granted, forgetting how useful it is and how revolutionary it was when it first entered their lives (something that, for most people, occurred only during the last decade or so).

For many aspects of web design (notably, layout and typography), CSS has been equally revolutionary. However, perhaps paradoxically, CSS has actually made usability relating to links worse than it was in the bad old days of font tags and scrolling marquees. The reason isn’t CSS itself – instead, it’s down to designer laziness, arrogance or ignorance (perhaps all three). Despite it being simple to set styles for each state of a website’s links, many designers no longer do so, often styling only the default and hover states. However, although the active state (the state when a link is being clicked) is arguably not the most important thing to exist on the web, the visited state is handy, providing users with an at-a-glance indication of which pages they’ve already visited.

About the author:

Name: Graig Grannell
Site: www.snubcommunications.com
Areas of expertise: Information architecture, site concepts, graphics, interface and front-end design
Clients: Swim~, Rebellion, IDG
I’d most like to meet: A record producer who likes my music

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