Re: Learn more, Read more, More

Hal Shubin wrote:
> You're designing a Web page, and there's a list of articles, each with
> the first sentence of the article as a tease. That sentence ends with a
> link to get to the full article. What should that link text be?

As Skot Nelson said, the actual wording depends on the context.

Suggestions:

 more ( with ... or > )
 read more (ditto)
 read full article
 read full story

I go for the redundant approach and recently linked the heading,
teaser and the 'more' link in http://www.the-racehorse.com/
(although, if I were in charge of the visual design, I would
have put the more link at the end of the teaser).

I've been collecting information on my company's web site on
whether people click on headings on 'more' links on our
journal (http://www.limov.com/journal/). I've just analysed
the results from the past five years over time.

The 'more...' link is clicked four times more than the
heading link.

(The heading link is linked but not in a link style and has a
small (unclickable) bookmark icon next to it. The heading
goes link blue/underlined on hover. The 'more' link is a
small italic "more..." in non-underlined link blue.)

Anyway, I normally have a rule that links should look like
links but, in this case, I make an exception because of the
redundancy and because a page of lots of blue text is not
good: only the 'more' link looks like a link, the heading
and teaser look linky on hover.

The reasoning is that people are used to certain things being
links in heading/teaser combos; some people might click on
headings and others on teasers whilst some might just go for
the thing that looks like a link.

The redundancy provides bigger link targets: teaser, then
heading, with the 'more' link smallest.

I just had a look at the BBC news site (ooh, Tim Berners-Lee
has received the Order of Merit) and they have a (L-R) linked
black-bordered thumbnail, blue non-underlined linked heading,
black non-linked teaser (no 'more' link).

I think that people need to read the teaser before deciding
whether to read more, and so I still think there needs to be
also some kind of 'more' link (so that people don't have to
effectively click a link that's behind).


Paola
--
http://www.paolability.com/

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