#6 A Chain Is Only As Strong As The Weakest Link

Links are one of the vital components of every website. Their primary function is to guide the site user to his or her desired destination and to create a smooth navigation experience, sort of like a tour guide that brings tourists from place to place. Many web designers tend to overlook the importance of links on webpages they create, thinking that they are just a minor element in webpage design. Links, as insignificant as they seem, can make or break your users' navigation experience. It determines whether you can captivate and engage a potential customer/visitor or turn them away, possibly forever.

Here's a general rule of thumb. A link, as fancy as you wish it to be, must still fundamentally look like a link. Keep in mind that when designing your website, your visitor may not be as tech-savvy as you are. Web gurus can probably detect a link pretty easily even if it hardly seems like one, but to the mass users, they may miss out that important link of yours, just because it's not underlined or in bold.

The best way to design your links is always to differentiate them clearly from normal text, either using text-decorations or font-weights like italics, bold or underline. It will also be good to use a different color for links so that your visitor doesn't end up mistaking a word for an emphasized text (cos it's in bold) when it is actually meant to be a link. Otherwise, that will mean one less customer reading your latest promotions and offers, and hence losing that chance of a possible sales transaction.

Another tip is to highlight active links, visited links, and links that the visitor has yet to click on. I have come across many websites where you can't tell the difference between a link you've visited before and a link that you've yet to visit. I guess I can understand that perhaps it might seem more visually appealing for all your links to look the same way (i.e. same color), instead of a mixture of colors, some indicating visited and some indicating unvisited links. Well, ultimately it is important to have a balance between the aesthetics and the function that your links serve.

If you are building an e-commerce website and you're allowing users to do online transactions, it becomes especially important to let your customers know which store departments or products they have already visited. Imagine yourself as a customer shopping online and you end up having to guess which pages you have already visited. Frustrating, isn't it? You click on a link, it brings you to a page, you start reading all the product details and THEN! you realise you have read all that already! Dealing with customers via online platforms is the most tricky of all retail forms because if they get put off by the shopping or surfing experience you give them, they'll go somewhere else. As simple as that.

It is also vital to check and conduct dry-runs of your site before your officially launch it for visitors to enter. Be sure to clear your history and all your cookies so that all your links are fresh. Give the links on your site a thorough sweep to make sure there are no broken links hidden at some remote page on your site. Sometimes, it might be inevitable that there are errors on your site, especially if there are more than one administrators doing updates to the site. One simple and effective solution is to provide a feedback portal for your users to throw opinions and comments at you. It'll be good to have a feedback@yoursite.com email address so that feedback will be sent to the right person/department in charge. If you can't spot problems with your links, let your users tell you the problem then. Although it really doesn't feel good as the web designer when people shoot criticisms at you, treat it as constructive feedback from perople who genuinely feel that your site can be made better. In fact, you should be happy that your visitors actually take the effort to tell you how they feel. Upon receiving such feedback that there are still links that aren't working at optimum, make the necessary amendments and don't forget to thank your visitors for their valuable feedback. They're acting as your eyes after all.