Don’t Be Afraid of the Big Bad Link
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
Once upon a time there was an impressive web page where sentences and images played among informative paragraphs and semantic structure. It was a pretty image, an isolated field of (X)HTML and CSS with the snippet here and there of JavaScript clover. But, in the limited vision of it’s designer, this was an isolated savannah without any real horizon.
Enter the humble and often under-appreciated hyperlink, a mechanism which glues web pages into a cohesive universe that spans the planet. The hyperlink is sometimes ignored, paled to the background, deprived of significant identification and pummelled into overcrowded navigation hierarchies.
Some designers approach hyperlinks with the abandon of any other graphic design element – a jpg or a horizontal rule. Why? The hyperlink is a foundation of the web itself, not something to be designed around and pushed aside casually. Hyperlinks offer an affordance that they are clickable, that you can follow them to other even more valuable and rewarding resources, they can transport and inform and even archive your visit through a complex information architecture. Hyperlinks have scent and can trigger responses in users beyond a static cloud among whitespace. They are, arguably, the most powerful and primordial design element on a well executed interface.
