Many thanks for your feedback. As you may have noticed, I have taken note of your suggestion.

Whilst the links were blue, I had given them a slightly aqua hue so that they blend in nicely with the color scheme of this blog without breaking usability conventions. The contrast was appearing correctly on my monitor but when I tested it on other monitors especially CRTs, I have found them to be not as clear. Thus, I have altered the link color to a more web safe blue.

I trust that this is better. However, if the links are not so visible, please do tell me.

Thanks once again,

Justin

This post is about making links in your content usable. Indeed they are all blue (#1) and underlined (#2). I have indeed enhanced the contrast of the blue of these links as (based on your comment, and that of Erin below) it was a lower contrast blue.

With regards to the different “links” in the left column, these are not links but sub navigation elements. I will be covering navigation usability in a separate post. Like good usability practice, these are placed in the left hand of this blog since it is where users mainly look for sub navigation. Also, I have styled them differently than the other links simply because I don’t want them to be confused with content links. With regards to the links in the “entry was posted” and “Justin”, I have underlined them to show they are clickable but I did not want to distract the user by giving them as high as priority as the links in the content (which are more important since the “entry was posted” is merely a filter).

Therefore, whilst it is true there are four styles, they have been used consistently (which like you correctly pointed out is an essential usability aspect) and in different levels of priority (which like the use of different headings to indicate priority) is also a good usability practice.

Was in the middle of reading your post… but suddenly scrolled up and looked at the links in the non-numbered-list content on this page.

Though the links they were blue, they were a very light aqua/neon/blue and were very low contrast on my brighter monitor. It wasn’t easy to read what the links said.

I also had to put my eye about an inch from the screen before I could see whether or not the links changed color on rollover or not.

I have great eyesight and no glasses… but had this issue on 2 of the 8 monitors here at my office. It’s of course very different from monitor to monitor, but they are rather low-contrast.

I’m not sure if light/aqua blue links that change to a similar (?) hue on rollover are great usability/make for a great user experience, and if they match up with your recommendations in the article?

This is of course nothing more than my two cents–I’d love to hear your feedback about these thoughts.

Thanks Justin!

-erin

Thanks for bringing this up. The ability to format content for printing purposes is indeed a usability guideline. Whilst I do not agree with you in adding it as a number 16 to this list (since this list is solely reserved for links usability), I will add a print button so my posts can provided in a printable format.

16. Make the page printable.

I had to either copy the text and paste it into a text/Word document or print this at 45% in order to attain a hard copy of this blog entry. Please consider that the User might want to share information at a meeting or print off a copy to read when he or she is away from the computer.