Links are the fabric of the web.

In this post I discuss the importance of link styling, and in particular, text links. I emphasise that link styles form a core prerequisite in designing a great user experience.

Users love well designed link styles

But lets not kid ourselves… users are unlikely to turn to their friends in a bar and say ‘did you see those links, they were hot’. No, but they might say ‘That website is great’. In many cases a website is ‘great’ because it is easy to use, with well designed, intuitive link styles.

Users want the following things from a link style:

• links should be easy to recognise : a user should be able to quickly and easily scan and identify links within a web page
• links should be responsive : links with hover states provide further visual confirmation that the text is a link
• links should communicate behaviour : if a link is pointing to an external site, than the link should be styled in a way that indicates this

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It has been hard in the past to publish video on the web reliably, for a number of reasons, low bandwidth being the larger of the limiting factors. But there are many more users with fat bandwidth and big monthly quotas then there were 12 months ago. In November 2006 Australia’s largest internet provider Telstra, launched ADSL2+ and uncapped its ADSL1 services. Accordingly, the appetite for broadband has grown. Various reliable sources report :

• internet usage increased by 4% in 2007 to 74% of the population (ITU)
• there are approximately 5 million broadband connections australia-wide (OECD)

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We have recently began submitting forms via AJAX rather than the traditional full page load approach. It is working very well. The challenge now though is to make this approach as accessible as possible and set focus correctly when the returned markup is rendered. So much to consider! But rather than discuss accessibility here, I thought I’d offer for general consumption some AJAX activity loaders for use in your next wizz bang application. Read the rest of this post »