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Joe Surfer loves that stuff!
NOW, have you been to Adobe.com's web site lately? No rollovers and a PageRank of 10. That, in the context of this post, blew my mind!
Just ask RC Jordan who has the ugliest sites ever which make great revenue!
//PS sorry RC..:)
I will grant that in the wrong hands this becomes nonsensical and abused. Rollovers only serve to let the viewer know that the button is indeed a link. These can be done tastefully and without eating up to much bandwidth as well. Preloading images helps a great deal.
I find sites that use all text links rather similar and conformist.
Sounds as though the most interesting thing for the visitor to do is click through and buy something!
I've recently been learning to make "buttons" with CSS, and have been pleased with the results. It gives the best of both worlds - the spider-friendliness of a text link plus the visual interest of a rollover effect.
Thats a good thing though yes? The most interesting anytbody should be able to do in a site is to "buy" (purchase, enquire, sign up whatever) what is offered as fast as possible.. That should be far more compelling than going further into the site or leaving. That's the nub i think...
Ive been musing on some ideas that the more boring the website, the more likely someone is to click on a "revenue" link.
We have very high content info sites, the worry i have is that people get so caught up in getting all the free content, they are too tired in the end to click on that newsletter subscribe button or enquiry link, or purchase link..
Striking the balance is what is consuming my design mind at the moment.
Ive also come accross some sites that are so beautiful that i am afraid to touch them in case they break!
Im not sure I care too much for aesthetics in a web site apart from it being use freindly, direct, and lets me do what i went there for. There is a place for aesethetics in art type sites, graphic based weblogs for example, as well as others,, but when it comes to websites, functionality should be king. Its great when a site does both.
I've recently been learning to make "buttons" with CSS
sounds good, i've been using css to produce "rollover button" effects for a while - works for me. ... the buttons are just text links of course.
I always thought hover behavior was much more than a gimmick - it's a valuable usability enhancement IF you can afford the bandwidth. Even defining a non-default css hover takes some bandwidth. On a high traffic site it all adds up.
I will always want text links. If I need to incorporate branding then Flash is my tool, but Flash navigation should be used in an elegant fashion and not for psychedelic mumbo-jumbo.
I think the reason the top PR sites don't use image swaps is because they want to have a large audience. You never know who has what and what is turned on. They try to appeal to as many users as possible.
The only problem I see with this approach that the letters have to be antialiased with white to look good against a white background. But will look like hell when the background color changes. The workaround is to get creative and have the colors come through a circle or a line or whatever, from the background td.
how do you make a link work from behind a graphic?
Sorry, I skipped an important detail. The a:hover rule you choose must change the background-color, not just the link color.
By definition, background color will show through any transparent area in a graphic. If the graphic is itself a link, then on hover the color that shows through the transparent areas will change. This gives the sense that the image is a rollover.
make a gif out of words like "Home" "Contact Us" etc. But make the background transparent.
Just a little heads up - you need to watch out for anti-aliasing because it will be shaded to a given background, so if you change the color of the background it might look anywhere from identical to horrible with the new background color.
Anything with purely horizontal and vertical edges won't be affected.
Tom
You can choose image and hover colors so that the change doesn't create noticable jaggies, IF you know ahead of time that there can be a problem. I work these issues out in Photoshop first, so I know what background colors will fool the eye well enough before I write the CSS.
Monitor images are always a bit of smoke and mirrors - after all, every image is only a pile of square blocks. So doing well with graphics is a lot like being a stage magician.
