Importance of Visited Links Revisted

One of my readers was kind enough to give feedback that he was having difficulty keeping track of my link collections since the visited links had the same appearence as the normal links. So now when you click a link in a post, you see the underline convert to a dashed line. Few web designers might overlook this at times…

Of course it does not make a difference when there are a few links, but it makes a lot of difference in pages where there are hundreds of links. Why hire a professional web designer when you can design a web site yourself.

An article to Change the Color of Visited Links says

“People get lost and move in circles when websites use the same link color for visited and new destinations. To reduce navigational confusion, select different colors for the two types of links. The oldest usability guideline for any type of navigational design is to help users understand where they’ve been, where they are, and where they can go.”

“Currently, 74% of websites use different colors for visited and unvisited links, making this design approach a strong convention that people have come to expect.”

Here are more excellent ways to style visited links by using css like adding images, strike through, change case and add text and the use of :before and :after pseudo elements

“CSS offers various possibilities to make links more usable and preserve text readable at the same time. We need to differentiate visited and unvisited links, but we must keep text readable and flowing. Please, don’t missuse or overuse this techniques.”

Another website design tutorial on making visited links radical teaches how to add a check mark after visited links. Well I have tried my own style and the underline below links breaks into a dashed line when visited by some smart css techniques – and it does not affect links in the footer and sidebar. I hope my readers will find it useful for browsing around this site.

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