One of the biggest usability problems on the internet is still the inconsistency in which links are displayed. Back in the good old days my Netscape browser displayed every link on nearly every website in the same way because not many people knew how to change their looks. Nowadays this is not the case anymore. Probably one of the first things a web designer does when building a new site is overwriting the default link design. However this leads to a lot of pain especially for people who did not grow up with the internet and do not have that sixth sense when it comes to knowing what word, box or picture is a link and which is not. Lets have a look at Twitter as a concrete example. As you can see Twitters main site uses a wide range of designs for their links: underlined text, text in a different color, boxes, pictures,... I doubt that you can tell me the number of links on the page after one quick look. Now lets compare this with the most visited site on the internet the Google Search homepage. As you can see the site uses only one design for every link: blue underlined text. Obviously this makes it very easy to spot links.

It will be interesting to see how this topic will evolve further. I strongly believe that it is important for every website to have a consistent way to design links.

By the way this post was inspired by my own attempt to improve the links on this site. As you can see every link, except to top menu, is underlined, now. Hopefully this will have a positive effect on the usability of the site.