Dec 08
4
Figure 1: JustJared.com
I’m amazed at times to I see high profile websites breaking what I consider to be unspoken “laws” of web design. One of the first of which would be to insure that visitors to your site can distinguish between clickable and non-clickable text. For example, you want readers to easily see at-a-glance how to navigate through your website.
This unspoken “law” is broken by some of the biggest web sites, and even some very popular blog templates which can become high profile sites.
I will be picking on the incredibly popular JustJared.com tonight because I happened to walk by my wife when she was on this site and I wanted a good example of exactly what I would not do to a site.
Area 1 (see figure 1 near logo at top): Check out the link below and look at the main logo where it says “TOP CELEBS” on the left and has a list of celebrities (I’ve highlighted it orange). Tonight the list’s upper left says Angelina Jolie and ends at the bottom right with Zac Efron – but you cannot tell at-a-glance that these are clickable links.
Area 2 (see figure 1 above article): These are older and newer links which take you to the post before and after the current post. Again you cannot tell at-a-glance that these are clickable links.
Area 3 (see figure 1 right edge): Here again is black text hiding its “clickability”. There’s a link above the banner for potential advertisers to click if they are interested in advertising on JustJared.com and then below the banner is a list of designers – designers of what I do not know, but again they are black and you cannot readily tell they are clickable.
Another way to put this idea is that as much as is possible you want to make your web sites as easy to use as possible. You don’t want visitors looking around trying to learn how to use your site, you want them clicking around reading stuff and clicking on stuff without any thought whatsoever – okay, you do want a little thought, but you want their thoughts to be about your content, whether or not to click your ads, and whther or not to buy something on the site.
