links for 2009-12-29

To give you a flavor for some of the less supportive comments, I have been called a clown, narcissistic, a nobody, arrogant, envious, holier-than-thou, a blowhard, self-obsessed, an idiot, puritanical, misguided, a hater, a fascist, a moron, a pinhead, and ignorant. And that's just a short list. I admit that the veracity of these descriptions are up for debate, but I'll leave that discussion to the readers of my blogs.

There has been a lot of discussion about labeling links with literal callouts for the action or word to click. The appendages for “here” and “click here” are contextually messy and visually ugly, but if they improve usability, it might be a worthy tradeoff. For this test, I was curious about how it would affect the raw clickthrough rate.

This result surprised me. Simply adding “here” as the link at the end of the phrase increased the clickthrough rate by 27% to 12.81%.