Best color for web links
Is the hypertext links color, meant to be blue? Well, yes. Google made an experiment with two type of links color, blue and green, or more precisely using colors between blue and green and guess what? It seams that blue links are more clickable, people are more often click on blue links than green ones (hmm, still wondering why techcrunch is using green links).
But why blue? Why not red links, orange or black? This is a hell of question, since nobody can stand with a strong answer. But let’s list together a few theories about blue “Google” link color, why is this that impressive, what are the possible motivations for people to click on blue links:
1. We’ve got used with blue links from the beginning of the internet, the blue links being used as a universal link color. Nowadays is still the default link color for all the existent web browsers.
2. Blue stands out. I’m not so sure about that. I’m thinking that red is a more powerful color that blue, more dynamic and it should (I think it actually do) do a great job in sales. But let’s just admit that between blue and green, blue stands out.
3. moreover, some designers are even thinking that hypertext links should be either blue or purple (which is actually the color of craigslist links!). Both Gerry McGovern and Jakob Nielsen have a strong belief that should be no links other than blue and purple (the last one for visited links) if somebody really wants users clicking on that links. They think that changing the links color from “default” is confusing the users.
My opinion? Oh, well, stick with the default blue color. Why? Simple, it sales, is clickable and why not? At the end of the day, is a nice color. Just don’t forget to add an underline for your website links.
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Congratulations, you have a great website.
I really interested in.
In my opinion, the blue is a color that may be more considerable as a web link color than others. because it doesn’t depend on what color your text is. Maybe you are using black, green, yellow, and even blue itself. but as you said with an underline for a link with blue color, every users will recognize that this is a link. Maybe other colors are good for having users attention, but in my opinion ( I’m a website designer ) , our internet users know links just by blue.
Again thanks for your good website and post.
I think we are talking about a very specific user persona when we think that links should be blue. Most users who are browsing the internet on a daily basis are used to determining that the simple colour different, or underline can quite often represent a link. For users that extremely new to the internet (read, my mother), they quite often don’t associate blue with link and will miss the links altogether. While blue is a good indicator, the more we as designers and developers diversify by using different colours, the more most users will recognize the colour difference as something you can click on. I quite often will use a colour from the design palette, as well as a change in colour on hover for links. Just my thoughts.