It's all about links

Feb 22, 12:36 AM - and

Maybe this is just me, but it bugs me to no end when people don’t specify a hover colour and a visited colour. I don’t really care about the active colour (although I’m sure it’s very important for some reason I really can’t recall at the moment, I need to sleep) it’s just the hover and visited colours that I crave.

Why? Well unfortunately for me (and everyone else like me) people don’t always make it obvious that a link is a link (even though they should), specifying a colour for hover helps me when I’m searching through a mass of text for a link that’s not painfully obvious. Of course, we could skip all that and just make the links bold and or give them a nice juicy border along the bottom as well as a nifty hover colour.

Not only that but it looks good (perhaps I can appeal to their sense of style?), hover colours add a little pizazz to a page, they make it sparkle. When you’re stuck wondering what else you can possibly do to make your design complete, turn to hover and visited colours! That’s what all the cool kids are doing (besides drugs and myspace angle shots).

Another thing I like is seeing where I’ve been and what I’ve done. When I’m browsing around, oh lets say Livejournal, for links to various graphic resources I like knowing which sites I’ve already bookmarked and which ones I’ve discarded (all lumped together under the category of “visited”). Don’t tell me you haven’t thought that it was handy, haven’t we all?

And on Google, when you’re searching for vomiting ketchup chips and somehow end up at my site (and find out that I don’t actually have any information on vomiting ketchup chips), wouldn’t you like to be able to go back and know that you’ve already clicked on my website and found it useless in that regard. I know I would.

And what is with all this “make the links jump around so that Becky thinks she’s gone crazy”? Don’t add a letter spacing to the hover when there isn’t any for the link (or vice versa) and don’t add any extra padding or go from lowercase to uppercase or uppercase to lowercase. It annoys me (yes my opinion is gold, everyone listen to it).

Don’t even get me started on those who unwittingly use HTML comments to block out their links in any browser that doesn’t “fix” crappy coding. What is the world coming to!? People don’t have any sense of decency these days (I blame MTV).

Tags: css, font, tutorial, web-design

I remember visiting so many sites that it was almost impossible to click some of the links, since they jumped whenever I hovered on them and that led to the text link flashing back and forth.

#1 Jade Feb 22, 14:17 Permalink

I don’t have a different color for ‘visited’. I could add one now but a) I’m lazy and b) the next layout will have one. If I ever get around to make the next layout… (refer to a).

#2 Carina Feb 22, 15:01 Permalink

I meant to say ‘making’.

P.S. I actually comment here more often but I usually click ‘preview’ and forget to ‘submit’.

#3 Carina Feb 22, 15:02 Permalink

I like your site. And I mostly agree with you about the links thing. I don’t care about the visited unless there’s a lot of links that I’d need to click on. For personal sites though, it doesn’t matter to me because I usually remember if I’ve checked their about me page or whatever. I do hate when the hover makes the text move all around.

I also agree with you on this subject. I hate how people change their fonts in forums. I also don’t like big, stupid signatures…

And cool commenting form. I need to prettify mine, but eh, I don’t comment myself so I haven’t gotten around to it. I do like how you have the little link/bold/italic click buttons. Pretty cool and totally came in handy when I tried to link to that post. I kept thinking I did something wrong because I’m not familiar with Textpattern.

#4 Sydney Feb 22, 17:29 Permalink

I agree with you; making links stand out and respond to a visitor’s actions is always a nice finishing touch to any site design. However, that’s only if the designer doesn’t change font sizes, font weights, or letter spacings so that the words all shift (and perhaps even wrap to the next line)...

#5 Dorie Feb 22, 18:24 Permalink

I HATE WHEN PEOPLE FUCK AROUND WITH THE LETTER SPACING FOR LINKS! I can never click the link because it jumps around. D:

#6 Emmy Feb 23, 00:24 Permalink

I hate visited colors though, they look ugly in my personal opinion. I’m always trying to clear my cookies so they go back to the original color :P That’s OCD for you.

I agree though, links should be obvious and should have atleast some effect on hover

#7 Matt Feb 23, 13:27 Permalink

Ok, I think you should go into the layout making business. I always love your new themes. I really like this one. ;)

#8 Cheryl Feb 23, 15:32 Permalink

Cheryl, I love making layouts but I’m a greedy bitch. Whenever I set out to make a layout to distribute on the internets I inevitably end up using it for myself :P Thanks though!

Matt, visited link colours are important though, particularly for external links. Visitors > personal preference I’m sry2say.

Emmy, I know! I’m one to talk though, if you hover your pointer over the border along the bottom of the links on the navigation they flicker. But it doesn’t do it anywhere else so I think I’m good.

Sydney, it’s textile and I think you can download it for Wordpress (if that’s what you use) :) And thank you

#9 Becky Feb 23, 21:55 Permalink

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