Studies in Hypertext: the Conversion of Traditional Texts into Web Sites  

The production of a web page has become a common assignment in a number of university classrooms, but there has yet to be established a pedagogy for the generation of large group-generated web sites that replicate the methods found in industry. In Studies in Hypertext, a course offered to technical communication students at the University of Central Florida, such a pedagogy is being shaped. In this course, students with little or no experience in web site generation work their way through a series of written and small web site construction tasks to eventually produce one complex and competently-integrated web site.

Applen, J.D. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext

Traffic from Referring Sites

The amount of traffic referred to a site from other sites seems to follow a Zipf distribution quite closely. The figure shows the distribution of traffic referred to useit.com from other websites during the first three months of 1997. Each dot on the figure represents a URL from which one or more users followed a link to useit.com. Even though the data is not a perfect match with the Zipf curve, it does seem to be the case that the referrals are reasonably close to the Zipf curve. In other words, there are a few other sites that direct a lot of traffic to useit (either because these sites have very high traffic themselves or because they have prominent links to useit). Note that search engines (the blue dots) are strongly represented among these often-referring sites.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1997). Design>Web Design>Hypertext

What is Good Hypertext Writing?

There is more to writing than putting words next to each other, and there is more to writing hypertext than throwing together a bunch of links. When writing text, I have certain goals; when I come across text I dislike, there are certain reasons why I do not like it. You're about to read an attempt to describe these reasons and goals; it is incomplete, subjective, and honest.

Degener, Jutta. Technischen Universitat Berlin (1998). Design>Web Design>Hypertext>Writing

When to Link Out of Your Site

You should only link out of your own site as a last resort. In general you want to keep your visitors at your site. Heck, isn't that why you built it? But there are times when it makes sense to stop the insanity and add that link. You must send visitors away sometimes.

Rhodes, John S. WebWord (1999). Design>Web Design>Hypertext>Usability

Writing Hypertext Copy

The two pitfalls of writing hypertext copy are links and emotions. Links are a new stylistic element that writers must learn to handle. The emotional problem is harder: we must snap out of the 'host' or 'provider' role, must get away from the excitement of guiding another person through the text, and get back to - just writing.

Degener, Jutta. Technischen Universitat Berlin (1998). Design>Web Design>Hypertext>Writing

Препратки по хипертекста

Кратка история на хипертекста, дискусия за хипертекст (теория и практика), и структура на хипертекста.

Ivanov, Zhivko. FortuneCity (1999). (Bulgarian) Design>Web Design>Hypertext

Longitudinal Trends in Academic Web Links    

Longitudinal studies of web change are needed to assess the stability of webometric statistics and this paper forms part of an on-going longitudinal study of three national academic web spaces. It examines the relationship between university inlinks and research productivity over time and identifies reasons for individual universities experiencing significant increases and decreases in inlinks over the last six years. The findings also indicate that between 66 and 70% of outlinks remain the same year on year for all three academic web spaces, although this stability conceals large individual differences. Moreover, there is evidence of a level of stability over time for university site inlinks when measured against research productivity. Surprisingly, however, inlink counts can vary significantly from year to year for individual universities, for reasons unrelated to research which undermines their use in webometrics studies.

Payne, Nigel and Mike Thelwall. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Academic>Hypertext

Links and Hypertext: An Introduction to Links and Hypertext

Some types of links are more accessible than others, and some types of links are completely inaccessible to people with certain types of disabilities. Because links are so basic to the functionality of web content, inaccessible links are one of the most severe barriers to overall accessibility.

WebAIM (2005). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Hypertext

Common Ways Links Fail Users

I’ve thought of a few ways that links can fail users. By preventing these sorts of things (which admittedly, aren’t all that easy to prevent) we can design better links with the hopes of attaining that place where users never get lost.

Porter, Joshua. Bokardo (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Hypertext

Image Links vs. Text Links

Years back, we compared successful clickstreams (clickstreams that resulted in users accomplishing their goals, as observed in tons of usability tests) with unsuccessful clickstreams (clickstreams where users abandoned their goals before completing), looking for any clues that would help us predict behaviors in one that we didn’t see in the other. One factor we looked for was whether the clickstreams contained image links versus text links — does one type of link show up more often in successful clickstreams than the other. Our finding was when users clicked in image links they were just as likely to succeed or fail as when the clicked on text links. There was no statistically-meaningful difference.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Hypertext

Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages

Contrast the Dove home page to the Dove site map. Using 5 times as many links, this page gives a real picture of the content of the site. Even with 148 links, it is well designed and organized nicely. It's easy for users to find what is available quickly.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Articles>Web Design>Hypertext

Helpful Hyperlinks with JavaScript

There you are happily surfing a web site; you click a link and suddenly find yourself at another site being asked to download a file. What happened there? Annoying, isn’t it? There has to be a better way to indicate to your visitors where a link is going and to what type of file. So, to help solve this little annoyance, I’ve written a bit of JavaScript and CSS that adds pretty little icons after the links—depending on the file extension and location—to indicate to the user the type of document they’re about to load.

Somerville, Toby. SitePoint (2008). Articles>Web Design>Hypertext>JavaScript

BlockShopper v. Jones Day: The Right of Web Sites to Link

Cases that have addressed links and copyright dealt with the permissibility of "deep linking"—linking to a page other than the home page—which, of course, is indeed permitted. Ticketmaster famously lost a lawsuit against Tickets.com about just this. But that case was about copyright infringement; by making a trademark claim instead, Jones Day opened up another legal avenue.

Davis, Wendy. Slate (2009). Articles>Web Design>Legal>Hypertext

How Many Links Are Too Many Links?

To understand how much content effluvia we're subjected to, I wanted to see how many links are on the homepage of popular websites. For example, if I go to the homepage of the Huffington Post, I see 720 links, in one shot. Then click inside to a story and you've nearly doubled that number—it ads up pretty quickly. What about the tech blogs? BoingBoing Gadgets, 514. Gizmodo, 468. Engadget 432, all on one page. And on average, fewer than 1% of the links on news sites and blogs actually point to rich content, 99% are navigation and other article headlines. Aggregation site Techmeme has a whopping 1081 links.

Bilton, Nick. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext