Formatting Your Website’s Links

Whether you’re marketing plastic surgery or any other business on the Internet, it’s important that you take care when formatting your website’s text links. The appearance of links on your site can impact its usability. Some designers remove the traditional underlining of text links in order to create a cleaner, more appealing look. This, however, can cause problems for users as most have come to expect text links to look a certain way.

Most of us expect standard text links to be blue or purple in color and underlined. This is important. Even if you want to change things up and make your text links look a little different or snazzier, sticking with the conventional in this case is best. It’s important that visitors to your site be able to find the text links without getting confused or else they’ll simply leave.

There are sometimes when a change is necessary. For instance, a website with a dark background won’t do very well with a purple or blue text link. If you do need to change the formatting of your text links, be sure to provide your visitors with other visual cues so that they’re instantly recognizable as clickable text links. Though underlining is the most common visual cue, you can highlight non-standard links in other ways. For instance, you might consider adding a contrasting background color to the text links within your content, or using a different text color or font weight. You can also make changes in background color, text appearance, or even underlining only on hover, which is when the mouse hovers over a text link and the cursor typically changes from an arrow to a hand. Using any of these techniques in combination is often best.

hatever you decide to do with your text links, be sure that you remain consistent throughout your site. Make sure that all of the text links on all of your pages are formatted the same. It’s also a good idea to test your pages on different browsers to ensure that your text links look and function correctly.