My friends at Acorn Web Studio recently posted a plea to anyone thinking of using “click here” to indicate a link on their website:
I agree, of course, but I also think there are even worse ways of pointing to a link than “click here”! What about “To contact us, click ‘contact us’ at the bottom of the page”? “To see a list of our New Zealand offices, click the map of New Zealand on the left”? Or worst of all, “To submit an order, click ’shop’ on the menu bar, then click ‘online shopping’ and then ‘new customer’ or ‘returning customer’ as appropriate”?! You get the idea.
Why do people insist on referring to a link somewhere else on the page (or on some other page that first has to be navigated to) rather than just doing the sensible thing and re-linking? I think it has something to do with a fear of redundancy, of providing the same information more than once. This might be a carry-over from books: we “navigate” books by referring to a Table of Contents, one entry per section, so people think we ought to navigate websites the same way.
But when it comes to web navigation, redundancy is often a good thing. True, people like to be able to build a “mental map” of your site, so your navigation should be clean enough that it’s not confusing. But having a link in your menu bar that’s reiterated in your body text isn’t confusing, it’s helpful, and increasingly people expect it. (If we could, we’d do it in books too!)
