Where to Put the Links?

Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question:

Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant links at the foot of the page or in the right-hand margin.

Another school of thought says no. You need to make it easy for readers to find the link as they read the main copy. If you place it anywhere else, many will miss it.

And here's my answer:

The blessing and curse of hypertext is that it can take you so many places.

In regular print-based text, we follow the writer's line of thought. That "line of thought" is a metaphor for a great deal of pre-writing: consulting sources, reflecting on them and on one's own preferences and principles, reacting to the actual ideas as they appear in the words the writer has drafted. The final version is like a good meal, with each course carefully prepared and served in the proper sequence.

In hypertext, we have scarcely sat down and opened our napkins before we're invited to jump up and visit the kitchen to confirm that oregano was indeed used in making the soup. Before we can enjoy the first bite of beefsteak, we're back in the slaughterhouse and from there to the feedlot.

This can be both informative and entertaining. We may learn a lot about what went into our meal, but we risk missing dessert, coffee, and liqueur...not to mention some good dinner-table conversation.

How Scholars Use Hypertext
It's helpful to see what scholars do with such links. You could say they invented the first hypertext in their annotations to earlier documents and the footnotes by which they cite their sources. These break the narrative also, but scholars manage to ignore the disruptions. They absorb the information and then check the footnotes.

In the online medium, the "footnotes" are links—not to the original sources, but to citations at the bottom of the document, which in turn lead to the sources. A typical example is a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Go visit it and come back for my comments.

Welcome back. You've probably noticed that the NEJM article is not designed to be read online. The text sprawls across the whole screen. We have to scroll forever to follow the narrative. (We do have the option of clicking through to see the report's tables.) A sensible strategy would be to print it out, read it in our favourite armchair, and then return to the computer to check the links to the sources. We can click on a footnote number and "rappel" down the screen to the footnote, and then go on to the online source.

Serving Readers and Users
This is a pretty good format for "readers"—those who use the Web as a convenient archive for print documents. For "users"—those looking for information to apply to their own documents, or just for entertainment—it can be a bit awkward. It's especially awkward for bloggers, as I've learned in running my own blogs.

Most bloggers are writing for users, "hit and run" visitors who arrive, grab a fact or comment, and surf on to somewhere else. Blog posts (and many other website texts) should therefore be fairly brief. If they do run long, like this one, it helps to put most of the post "below the fold" on its own page. The user can see two or three posts on one screen, and then decide which to follow onto the next page.

So on my own blogs, like H5N1, I'm quite happy to include the links to my sources within the text of the post, usually with an excerpt. Only the most dedicated visitors need to visit the original source, so the link to that source won't instantly distract them. They can read the gist of the post at a glance (or with a little scrolling). And then they can visit the source for the full story.

Other Options?
Links on the side are another option. A good service of any website is to supply links to related sites, and blogs usually provide them. This is a convenience, but it may be necessary to supply blurbs with those links as well—many surfers are hesitant to click through to a different site unless encouraged to do so. But these links tend to be "stand-alone," unrelated to the main posts: They stay put in a side column, while the main posts gradually move down the page and disappear.

No doubt you might design a page so that links stayed to one side of the main text, but it doesn't seem worth it. Readers will still print out the text and then return to the computer to check the sources. Users will still want to grasp the main points of the post and then (perhaps) click through to the links, whether they're in the text itself or off to one side.

So designing the links of a post depends on knowing the kinds of readers you're writing for, and then providing what those readers are most comfortable with.

This post itself is a compromise. I expect people to read it online, not as a printout, so I've included a number of subheads to break up the text and help navigation. And of course I've included my links in the text, not at the bottom.

Of course I'd love to hear other opinions, whether you agree or disagree. This is an interactive medium, after all.

Comments

[Eliot (Amy)]

Making a distinction between readers and users is a crucial one - and knowing that some text is fit to be read online and some off makes sense, and should therefore dictate link styles.

The important thing about in-line linking is: context. Context is so crucial. "Related links" at the bottom or side of a page make sense the way footnotes or references make sense at the bottom of a page or end of a book. But contextual linking serves a different purpose. You can link a word to its definition, for instance, allowing a user to choose the definition or not, depending on the need. That's brilliant - and not something that's necessary or makes sense for a footnote.

I guess I'm saying I agree with you! You can't forget the user. Writing for the web works best when you also present for the user or reader. Providing pdfs or separate windows/tabs with formatted-for-print text is another way to force printing vs. online reading.

[Werner Patels]

I have been thinking about this too. What I have done on my site is this:

My site consists of regular blog posts and what I call "My Columns". The column pieces are usually at least 600 words long, and I don't use hyptertext links in my columns, as I try to give them the appearance of an opinion piece cut out from a newspaper.

In my blog posts, when I link to another source, I also quote the main portion of that text, so that readers can get the full impact and information without having to "jump ship" halfway through the post.

In my blog post about Canadian broadcasters yesterday, I tried another approach: I explain my views on the subject matter, and at the end of the post, the reader finds three hyperlinks under the heading "Further reading".

[Gina Rogers]

I agree with Amy's comment that a pdf attachment to open a separate window allows the reader to capture the "printable" version of an article. I think it depends on the website and the needs of the web authors. For instance, if the site is a blog, it may be fine to have links throughout the article to outside sites. That might be a case where the publisher doesn't mind the reader "jumping ship" halfway through the article. However, if the site is aimed at retaining the reader, then having the links pulled out is a logical way of accomplishing this goal while still offering a robust discussion of the topic.