Hyperlinks

Late last year, I urged OJR readers not to forget the value of hyperlinking, to look for opportunities to link their stories to supporting information elsewhere on the Web. Today, I'd like to continue with that topic and write a bit about the thought process behind link content, that is, the decision about which text within an article to links, and to where.

Let me start by writing that I am not going to address issues about the design of contextual hyperlinks -- issues such as whether to underline a link, what color to make it, etc. For those questions, I direct you to Jakob's Nielsen's outstanding Guidelines for Visualizing Links, which includes his usability guidelines for showing textual links.