When it comes to Internet marketing for plastic surgeons, or any business for that matter, the correct use of links on your website is an important part of usability. Links can greatly help your visitors navigate through your site. They keep visitors from having to enter a URL for every page they want to visit, which would be time-consuming and frustrating to say the least. Links can help visitors to navigate within a page, within the whole of a website, or to an external website.
Though links should make navigating a site easy and quick, they don’t always do just that. You must ensure that your links are correctly formatted, an important part of which is using standard link colors. Internet users have come to expect their links to look and function a certain way, and if you veer from that you’ll only confuse them. Your links should be visual cues that allow visitors to understand the navigation paths of your site. If they don’t do this, you’re likely to lose visitors. Keep the following in mind when formatting your links:
- Underlining. Most visitors expect links to be underlined and view underlining as cue of a hyperlink. Because of this, it’s important that you never underline text on your website unless it is a hyperlink. Your can use colors or bold or italicize your font to help emphasize important text rather than underline it.
- Consistent coloring. It’s important that you use the same color for your links throughout the whole of your website. Because it’s what visitors expect, it’s best that you use blue for unvisited links and purple for those that have been visited.
- Differentiating between visited and unvisited links. As mentioned above, it’s best that you use blue for unvisited links and purple for visited links. Whether you use these exact colors or not, it’s essential that you use a different color for links that haven’t been visited and for those that have. This will keep visitors from wasting time figuring out what pages they’ve visited and what they haven’t.
- Clarifying your links. Be sure that visitors understand what they’re getting by visiting a link. This is particularly important when linking to email addresses. Visitors may not realize that a text link is for an email address and will be frustrated when they have to wait for an email program to open.