Link presentation on the portal

[#1]

As mentioned recently in the usergroup forums, the last time we tried to change the way links are displayed it caused an uproar! However one of the main recommendations of my usability report was that visited links should change colour. This is particularly important in the support section so that you know which pages you have already looked at (either so you can avoid looking at them again or so you can find them more easily if they were useful). It is less important in places such as the member centre. Blue underlined links are certainly the easiest style to recognise but they are not necessary in all situations. As long as link presentation is consistent and links are easily differentiated from text, even on a first visit, then that's fine. Currently, however, neither of those requirements are met. What are your thoughts on links presentation?

[#2]

The underlined purple ones in this site look good, but they aren't changing once visited. We should set the scene here I think

[#3]

Good idea, test something here and see how it's received.

[#4]

Don't know if you've changed anything here yet, but the links I've visited seem to be changing to a lighter shade of purple which looks quite good

[#5]

I quite like the paler visited links, although it does make it a little harder to find links that have already been followed, as the visited ones contrast less. In honesty, I dislike underlined links where they fall within passages of text, and anywhere else that links occur, it tend to be obvious that the text will be a link, so underlining is not required. Keep it as it is for me, but perhaps revisit the text colours to see if there's a way to introduce a greater contrast between visited links and normal text.

[#6]

I've added this to the bugtrack, but thought I'd mention it here too. URLs in the 'Recent Blog Posts' box don't change colour to indicate that you have visited a URL, unless you specifically used the URL in the Recent Blog Posts box to read a post. I would imagine that once a URL has been visited, all links to that URL should be coloured to indicate that you had visited that page.

[#7]

Reason for the above pointed out by Colin: .... The link in the sidebar is http://community.plus.net/webportal/2007/04/16/27/ Whereas the link you get by following from the Blogs homepage is http://community.plus.net/webportal/2007/04/16/link-presentation/