Beth Jacobson <bethj@bajac.com> writes:
Marcin Kalicinski wrote:
There is a fairly estabilished standard on how links should look in "professional" sites. This is either "normally underlined" text in different colour, or nonunderlined text in different colour that changes colour when pointed by mouse. Microsoft.com, google.com, ibm.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com, nytimes.com, you name it, all stick to it. Deviating from that makes me say it looks non professional enough for boost.
Additionally, I'd rather have links in boxes on the right have the same style as links in the text.
If I might add my two cents, I agree with the above. I like the look of the page a lot, but the link style is confusing and counter-intuitive. This makes it a poor introduction to the Boost Libraries. One of the things that has impressed me the most in using the libraries is how intuitive they are. It's also a marketing issue since "intuitive" translates to lower training costs. It would be nice if that quality were suggested by the design of the website.
I hate to say it, but these criticisms are starting to ring true for me as well :( I still think of wikipedia.org as a prime example of a site design that works and looks good without any special help on my part. I wonder if we shouldn't use something much more like that?
How about using the same blue as the headings for both linked text and menu items? The menu headings could be switched to black to maintain the color contrast between the menu headings and items. Both text and menu links could be underlined on mouseover. I also agree with someone above who said that the menu headers shouldn't change on mouseover. The change says "link" to users and should be avoided unless that's what it really means.
Beth, your proposals sound interesting... but they'd be a whole lot easier to evaluate if you'd just make up the page or CSS stuff required and post it where we can all get a look at it.
Finally, and much less important. it might be nice to have a different link color for visited links, at least in the text and perhaps for the menu as well. Especially for someone exploring the libraries for the first time, it's nice to have a visual cue to tell you where you've already been.
It looks to me as though wikipedia does that, but it so subtle that I can barely see the change. At least it probably won't upset those people who *hate* the changing link color effect ;-)
Also, on my machine mouse cursor briefly changes to hourglass when moving on the link. It looks like it was flickering.
That could be solved by preloading the image with javascript. I noticed there's no js on the page and assume that was by design, but maybe an exception could be made in this case, since there'd be no added penalty for people without js. They'd just be subject to the same hourglass/flickering they've got already.
Care to contribute the code to do that? -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com