Back to basics - don't "click here"

A simple tip for the start of a new occasional series of ‘back to basics’ posts: Don’t use ‘click here’ as link text in your web pages. Ever.

This may be old news to seasoned web authors reading, but it’s one of the most common mistakes we see on the University website. Fixing it is one of the easiest ways to improve your web content.

A good summary of why ‘click here’ is bad circulated on Twitter a few weeks ago. I’ll not repeat the reasoning here, but definitely encourage you to read that article. It even quotes Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, who encouraged good linking right from the birth of the web.

‘Read more’, ‘more details’ or just ‘more...’ are bad too, for similar reasons. Use descriptive, scannable links instead and you’ll have made a huge improvement to your web content for very little effort indeed.

More back to basics tips coming soon...