Web Design Garage

Chapter 63. Choosing the Right Text for a Hyperlink

Creating a hyperlink is easy. You just drop a pair of anchor tags around the piece of text that you want the visitor to click.

Designing a hyperlink is another matter entirely. Exactly which text should you drop the anchor tags around?

The first rule of thumb for any text hyperlink is this: The link should tell the visitor what to expect with a click. That is, the text of the link should suggest where the hyperlink goes or what kind of information the visitor gets by following it.

Sometimes the choice is easy. If you have a list of links that functions as part of the site's navigation, you see right away that the links should be the full names of the nav categories, as in Figure 63.1. This wording ...