Link Styles and Information

June 29, 2005

Here is my post del mes, enjoy. I was thinking about the state of the hyperlink lately. How it looks, what it communicates to us and what we expect it to do. A link can look as abstract (namely flash applications) or as generic as the blue and purple it came in—it is all relative when it comes to looks. Now, whether it has been visited or if it will launch a new window or popup is another bit of infomation that a link can tell us.

What can a link tell us? First, I like to think there are two type of hyperlinks, (1) navigation links and (2) inline links. I don’t know if these are the best names for them but they make sense to me.

‘Navigation links’ are usually considered the main navigation of a website. We typically see this type of a link as a tabbed navigation or tabbed side links—either images or CSS styled. These links are usually permanant links, they don’t change everyday. You could even consider some advertising images or links as a ‘navigation link’.

I like to consider ‘inline links’ as hyperlinks that either appear within a block of text. For example this is an inline link . Also any links that are not necessarily part of the website’s main navigation structure.

When it comes to making the :visted link color a different color I think it is safe to say it should only apply to these ‘inline links’. These types of links are really the only ones that we want to know the visited status.

What are some alternatives to the typical link styles we see today? I looked around and this is what I found. (note: font-family and size may be different than original)

What more can you do? Like Zooiblog you can add a different backgound image to the links to change things up. Here are a few that I have been using. You want the image to be a fairly small file size, under 1KB, so it will load quickly or you can even use a part of an image that you have already loaded to save on download time for the background.