Blethen Maine Newspapers 2008 Standard Framework
Decoration
When a page consists of mostly text with only a few links, underlines are fine. But when large areas of the page are comprised of links, underlines become a distraction from the content and a hindrance to comfortable reading.
Text links should be either underlined or not underlined, sitewide. A combination is likely to be confusing.
Colors
Link and visited-link colors should be visibly different, and both should be very different from the default font color. It's also helpful for link and visited-link colors to be a significantly different shade than the default font color so links are discernable to colorblind users.
Linking
When viewed in a content management system or in the HTML code, a URL might look fine spelled out ("go to www.maine.gov/portal/") rather than presented as a link ("go to the State of Maine portal"), but by their nature, URLs do not contain spaces, so they don't wrap onto more than one line.
This causes a problem when the URL is wide and is presented in a narrow space. (The width of a URL will vary from browser to browser).
It's safest to present all URLs as links.
© 2008 Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc.
