Do you link your images?
Monday May 8, 2006
If you don't, you should. When watching customers use Web pages, especially with click tracing software, you will find that images are very popular to click on. Even if they don't look like buttons. So if you're not making your images "hot" then you're missing out on an opportunity to take your readers to other locations on your site.
Comments
Great idea that I should have thought of years ago. I have been missing those opportunities.
AndyW
Thanks for all your work. Read them all the time.
But where would I link a product image to? If it is the smaller image, I could link it to the larger. If I link the larger to the “Add to Cart” function, will that help the visitor in any way? (BTW: In this example, there’s no “Back” button to undo.)
Linking to the add to cart function will help them buy the product, which is usually the goal of a product image.
Perhaps you could link to more information about the product, or to a comparison chart, or possibly an article that relates to the product.
The point of the article was not so much that you must link all images, but to say that many customers automatically click on images. So you can take advantage of this by making them clickable. If you don’t have anywhere for the image to go, then you don’t need to link it.
Although i know about these things i ve never used it while working on it, it really good, thanks for opening our eyes, when u explain with some practical examples i get an idea where to use these tags effectively
I want to make my logo an active link to my home page on every page, but when it is active it takes on a light colored border, not attractive to my logo. I tried to use CSS to make the active link transparent or black but then it did all my links.
any suggestions?
Hi Kerry,
That’s a great question. I’ve added an FAQ to help answer it:
http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/f/blfaqimgborder.htm
Hi, your post about “Q. How can I turn off the border on linked images?” is very useful, but it does not eliminate the border on hover over an image. How would one do that? you can see an example at http://ilikegray.com/music.html