Merging Media and the Market

“Indecision may or may not be my problem”

Jimmy Buffett

So you’re designing a Web site: making decisions left and right that will effect how consumers perceive your company and use its Web site.  If you’ve been working relentlessly to design the perfect Web site click here.  But what are you ‘clicking here’ for? -  Tips on designing the perfect Web site?  An award for relentless web designer of the year? – Where a ‘click here’ link is going to take you is oftentimes a grey area because ‘click here’ can be taken in several contexts depending on the sentence it appears with. 

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Click here’ links can ruin an otherwise great Web site because they are not self-explanatory and are oftentimes difficult, if not impossible, to use.  While some historically believed that ‘click here’ links are beneficial to a Web site and increase traffic to a given link, they were wrong.  While the copy of a Web site is oftentimes someone else’s responsibility other than the web designer: don’t let a silly thing like a job description ruin your hard work.  Many designers stress over the visual design of a Web site, nitpicking over every little detail, striving for perfection: and then ruin all of their hard word by allowing ‘click here’ links to be used throughout the copy on the site. 

‘Click here’ links harm the indexing of your pages by making them unsearchable.  Some of the major search engines use the terms in link text to assist with indexing web pages. Using “click here” to identify related pages linked from pages on your site will harm the indexing of your pages and make it harder if not impossible for people to find your Web site.  On the other hand, using descriptive link text will help users find your page.

‘Click here’ as link text is also self defeating because it makes it difficult for viewers to use your web pages.  Ultimately, you should rewrite ‘click here’ to give users a good idea of where the link will lead them.

Furthermore, people generally don’t read online, they scan. There are a range of reasons for this:  People are busy and just want to find the information they were looking for – Now.  There is a lot of information competing for the attention of web viewers.  Furthermore, many users have difficulty reading online because of poor screen resolution, glare, tiny font sizes, poor contrast and so on. 

Link text stands out during a visual scan of a web page, provided the designer sticks to the norm of underlining links and using a different color from other text. Using meaningful or descriptive text links rather than ‘click here’ makes it easy for users to easily find links on your site that might be of interest to them. 

Furthermore, ‘click here’ links can be detrimental to users with disabilities.  Many web users that are blind or have difficulty seeing use screen readers (like JAWS or Window Eyes) to read web pages.  Just as sighted uses scan a page to see what’s available, screen reader users can scan a page for the links it provides to other resources. Oftentimes the screen reader programs read out just the hyperlinks on the page; and click here, click here, click here is not very helpful to anyone especially the overall design of a Web site.