Recently while proofing a design I had created a colleague of mine asked “Why do we not use blue links?”, to which my immediate response should have been ‘Why should we use blue links!”. However, to avoid an argument I let him speak about how users were used to the standard blue links shown on web pages and anything else could confuse, but does it and can it?

As a designer I try to understand aesthetics and usability in equal measure in an attempt to produce the best user experiences for the websites I create. Blue links as a standard however, leave me in an uncomfortable place; these have been the standard in web design since the beginning, but just because something has always been this way doesn’t mean it should never change, surely?

In my opinion there are three factors at work here, these are:-

• History
• Design
• Usability

So I feel I should touch on each separately…

History

As I mentioned above the blue link has been part of the modern web for as long as I can remember, which has created an expectation in some peoples minds as to how links should be represented online. Having understood this and accepted this concept it still doesn’t change the fact that blue link was conceved by someone technical, a logical thinker or programmer whose main objective was to keep plain text and active content immediately and visibly separate, in a world were web design hadn’t been born and where options were limited. Blue is naturally a vivid display colour so choosing this colour to highlight links was an easy choice. Yet things have changed massively since then, visual displays have improved, the addition of images and interactivity altered the web beyond all recognition, so surely we can move on and create new standards?!

Design

The history segment above can be argued with I’m sure, but here in design the blue link is the enemy! (Well in my mind it is anyway). Over exaggerated colours, animated gifs and cramped content are now becoming a thing of the past, or more accurately a remnant of the 1990′s. When the Internet was born it was the playground for technical geeks who communicated and shared, the interface that this occurred within was simply not important. Now however, users are born into the Internet, schools actively encourage very young children to play online and it all seems to come very naturally.

Every step of this modern learning is down to how the pages look and react; would children be as inclined to learn about web pages if they all looked and behaved the same. Is it not also interesting how as design has become part of the modern web the older generation embrassed the internet at a similar rate, and could this mean they are learning in the same way? The aesthetics of objects are tremedously important and dictate how we humans behave towards all sorts of things like magazines, advertising,  foods, books and even other people, but when the web was in its infancy the way the web looked was a relative low priority, with technical leaps being the main focus. Now however, the technology has slowed and people are now able to take a moment to look at the internet in a different way, with that slower pace comes an opportunity to start advancing the web in different other ways than just technical, shoudn’t now be the time where we can creatively improve the aethetics of the internet while at the same time improving users experiences, in the same way as we have seen with all other products over the years.

Usability

With this in mind I looked at the BBC Cbeebies website, here there are no blue links or at least very few. This is where my daughter took her first steps into the web and with no special guidance has been able to navigate this website and many sites since easily and instinctively since she was 2 years old. So how has she grasped this so easily? Well the BBC have used interactivity, anything that can be clicked moves or changes making its purpose really obvious to the user, and not a hint of blue or even plain text to be seen. This method moves away from the trusted blue links convention and assumes that users hover around a page, anything that looks different or interesting automatically makes a user gravitate towards it, once some activity is displayed, you click! – makes sense really. So if users are able to intuitively learn how a page works quickly and the design actively helps prioritise content either with colour, images, animation or activity then why shouldn’t it? Young children can grasp this without any direction so why shouldn’t everyone else, maybe we just need to have a little more faith?

Conclusion

Obviously there can be appropriate uses for blue links and I think search engines are a great example of this, I just feel that as long as links are obvious either with using colour or images that add to a design, or activity that emphasis the link we should be able to move forward away from this early method without causing any degradation of user experience.

Let me know what you think…

I was contacted today by a colleague for whome I had recently designed a static banner, she requested that I animate it, when I asked why an advert with one simple message needed animating she told me that during a presentation to her superior she was reprimanded and told it should have been! – I was stunned that a senior member of our company should have such an uninformed view of online advertising, and worse still be preaching it to their staff!

As a fairly experienced designer of adverts from print to web I understand the balance between customer satisfaction and user response quite well, I also have equally successful examples of both static and animated artwork; unfortunately sales teams don’t have this wealth of experience and prefer something esthetically pleasing or dynamic to wow a client and make the sales pitch that much easier for themselves, while I sympathise with sales teams wanting to keep their task simple in difficult times I can’t help feeling that it’s ignorance that makes the pitch difficult, not the dynamics of the advert.

Let me explain why I feel ignorance is the issue – Banner advertising has been around for a number of years now and web users are more switched on than ever before, at the same time various web browsers along with off-the-shelf software make it relatively simple to block banner advertising, one click and a web site’s ads are gone which is not good news for companies that have a banner advertising website model!  This is where the ignorance of sales people and teams starts to become a real issue, their need to keep the sale simple will inevitably damage advertising effectiveness as users either stop visiting your site or just simply block your advertising content.

My ethos is ‘less is more’ – yep not the first time you have probably heard this, but as far as I can tell there are three clear types of banner advert -

1. The adverts with one clear message and minimal text
2. Adverts for brand awareness only and again minimal contact copy
3. Those with a few clear key messages. 

 For me the first would be static this is because the simple message is the important part of the advert, it needs to be on screen for as long as possible giving the message the best chance of being absorbed by the user, while the second is using general content with no clear call to action, this naturally could use subtle animation to draw the users eye without distracting them too much (colour blends and changes would work well), the third where content is an issue I would use interactive animation i.e. when a user rolls over the advert an extra element is presented. 

Using the correct advert type for the content you are presenting is key, but because of the fear some businesses have of the Internet coupled with a lack of understanding the industries most in need of these revenues may simply cut their own throats.  Many web design blogs and websites have adopted the static advert model and seem to be making money, maybe the media industry should pay attention to this!

To prove that this can be successful Fusion Ads delivery network deals in only static advertising and currently delivers over 20,000,000 page views per month to its design network – Seems this is working quite well and may just be worth keeping an eye on.

I think some animation is necessary and sometimes you simply cannot get around it but it certainly shouldn’t be the industry standard.  If you have to animate an advert to make the sell then the advert is probably not going to succeed!

Slowly advertising is going to change and banners will disappear, so adapt now it will make a huge difference to the future and life of all online services.

See related article – http://nasarik.com/is-it-too-late-to-save-the-web-from-over-the-top-advertising/

Adverts are an integral part of the web, without web advertising most sites wouldn’t be able to bring us all that wonderful content for free so it is a shame that this medium of advertising has become a problem.  Users now have to cope with the ever increasing on-slaught of banners, pop-ups, pop-unders impact ads and well the list goes on, surely webmasters have started to realise that their users will inevitably go else where?

Websites across the world have surrounded their content with animated advertising whether it be simple .gif files or more complex flash animations which are on-the-whole completely unnecessary; don’t get me wrong, flash ads can be intelligently created delivering a clear message in a slick manner but ultimately these type of adverts are distracting to the user, we are trying to attract new users not scare them off, aren’t we?

Companies littering sites with these adverts is not being helped by an industry that delivers facts stating that animated adverts receiving more response which naturally implies that animation brings response, however, in my experience this hasn’t been proven true, some of the most successful advertising campaigns that I have witnessed have been simple quality designs with limited or no animation.

“For some reason it seems to have escaped every body’s attention that if we annoy our users they will go somewhere else, now what use to an advertiser is a website with no users?”

All any website wants to do is increase its user base while at the same time making enough money to keep it afloat, if we keep cramming over the top advert animations into web templates eventually the users will leave which inevitably will mean the money will to.

Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall and even the New York Times are just a few sites that use static adverts well, while others, and we all know who they are treat their web pages like a fun fair.  It’s not just the sites mentioned that are moving to a simpler way to advertise there are a number of sites coming up with more intelligent ways to incorporate adverts so that it becomes a part of the design and not an added extra.

I am guilty of getting caught up in the easy sell to customers of animation, so I am willing to do my bit to make web adverts feel less ridiculous and to show those who request overly animated designs the way forward.  If you read this article, and agree with the concept that less is more then please try and do your bit, if we all do a little to help stop this over use of animation it will eventually force a good change within the industry.