Off-site Links - Good, Bad or Ugly?
November 30, 1998
No navigational issue breeds more controversy than the question
of off-site links. Many sites allow no links to other sites,
believing that it's foolish to give visitors the opportunity to
leave your site. One of the many exceptions is Yahoo, which has
links to all its major competitors. Offering links to other sites
is a major component of the cooperative, egalitarian atmosphere
that prevailed in the early days of the Web. Many corporate
players, though, reasoning that they're on the Web to make a
buck, not to help their fellow man, believe that including
off-site links amounts to giving away valuable page impressions.
The author is basically pro-link. There's a simple fact to be
kept in mind here: If a visitor finds your site interesting,
they will stay a while, and perhaps come back another day. If
they don't, they won't. If they want to split to some other
site, their list of bookmarks is two inches away at the top of
their browser. Just because TVs have remote controls doesn't
mean that nobody ever watches a TV show all the way through,
does it? The kind of person who just instantly clicks on every
hyperlink they see is not going to buy anything in any case
(or accomplish much of anything in life, for that matter). To
the extent that links offer valuable resources to your visitors,
they're an asset, not a liability.
This brings up an important basic principle: Let your
visitors be free. Make your site flexible, so that they can
use it however they like. Don't try to force them to do
things the way you would like them to. Basically, this just
means having a strong navigational scheme, by following the
recommendations above. Having a standard navbar on every page,
and perhaps also a system of hierarchical links, means that
people are free to jump to any section of your site at any time
(and make sure that they're free to jump to the ordering page,
too!).
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