Introduction

Links enable you to follow a trail of information from one web page to another, and from one web site to another, regardless of where in the world the site's server is located. Without links, the allure of the Web would be lost.

Back in 1996, web usability expert Jakob Nielsen listed the use of nonstandard link colors as one of the top ten mistakes in web design (see http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html). However, his advice to color blue pages that haven't been visited by the user and to color purple or red links to previously seen pages, was based on consistency concerns, not on aesthetics. As the field of web design matured over the years, developers began playing with not only the color of web links, but also their design. In fact, links now typically comprise more than just underlined text or images with border attributes set to zero.

With this in mind, this chapter discusses how to stylize web links for improved aesthetics. You'll learn everything from how to remove the underline from links to how to change cursors, create rollovers without the need for JavaScript, create a horizontal tab menu, and much more.