What A Difference A Link Makes

Links are one of the most important facets of web design. Links are the means by which users get around the web. Imagine how tedious it would be if you had to type a complete address for every page you wanted to visit. It would be unusable. Since links are so important, it makes sense to give the issue some critical analysis. If you do links well, your users will reward you.

There are many ways a link can be represented on the web. The easiest is a standard "text link." Everyone is familiar with blue, underlined text that you can click on. This is probably one of the first things that new web surfers learn when they get on-line. But you can also use graphics, buttons, drop-down menus and more.

This is a story of good intentions that led to poor results. My client was a large manufacturer of consumer products (client name and all materials presented here have been altered for confidentiality). They had been wanting to add an e-commerce component to their web site as a complement to their other sales channels. However, their traditional brick and mortar retail accounts had some misgivings about the manufacturer selling directly via the Internet. My client was able to appease these retailers by only offering select items on-line and by making sure that the prices were slightly higher than those found in the retail stores. This seemed to do the trick and the company set about integrating a web store into their existing corporate web site.

The company decided that they wanted to provide a "special link" to their web store (see Fig.1). They had their graphic design team create a colorful banner-type graphic to be placed on many of the pages of their corporate site (the corporate site was designed by a third party agency). Sounds like a good plan, right?

Figure 1
A banner type link graphic to be used on the corporate web site