Did you notice how you just have to command people and they will follow your orders doing everything you ask them to do? No? Whew.
Luckily we’re not in the military here. We’re on the Web!
That’s only one reason why old school Calls to Action (CTAs) have to disappear from your website in case you are serious about business.
- Links
- articles
- buttons
deserve better. CTAs created for morons don’t attract most other people. Click here, read more, and submit is what website owners want, not users.
The good old days
Ahhh, do you remember the good old days of the early Internet? When I started using the WWW around 1997 in college, I used an old PC with Windows 3.2 I think. That was the system commonly used before the shiny new Windows 95 appeared. Our university was poor and we didn’t have such high-tech yet!
The WWW stood for “World Wide Wait” back then. To visualize that, let me tell you how I used the Web in those days: I clicked a link and then I started to read the material for my next seminar, we had to read like 50 – 150 pages every day. We went to copy shops and copied them from books printed on real paper! There was one printer available in the computer room.
After literally several minutes the page would slowly begin to load.
You could see the “alt” attributes of the images first on the Netscape 3 browser. Of course I could have used the installed text-only Mosaic browser or disabled images but in many cases I wanted the real-deal, the true blue multimedia experience!
Also there were no browser tabs in those days. You had to open a second browser window in order to view another site at the same time. Of course, having two browser windows open would slow down the already overheated machine. That’s why later I started to code my own web pages in HTML on Notepad in order to kill the time while the web pages were loading. So you understand now that
clicking a link was really an important decision to make in the early days of the Web.
Even an internal link would rob you a significant amount of time. No one did split an article in two or more parts because the load time would be too long. While scrolling was difficult as most mice didn’t have scrolling features yet, it was still way better than waiting again.
Most people new to the Web didn’t even know what a link was even though it was blue and underlined. That’s why webmasters tried to encourage usage of them by saying “click here”.
The worst thing were forms though! In many cases the only option to contact a site for me was a contact form in those days as there was no Webmail yet. My Unix based Pine mail program was installed only in the main computer science hall so when I browsed the Web in the library I couldn’t access my mail client. What happened on some contact forms? You have to imagine forms from those days as pretty bland. Also the usability was not really optimal.
You had two buttons by default below each form: one button actually was about sending the message while the other one was about deleting it.
One was called “submit” and the other one was “reset”. As a Web noob you could easily mistake one for the other especially as the “reset” button sounded similar to “send” and often was the first one that was displayed: [reset] [submit]. I have clicked reset accidentally numerous times, of course, especially after waiting several minutes for a page to load and being in a hurry.
Click Here
How enticing! What a promise! I’m sarcastic, of course. “Click here” is bad for usability, readability, accessibility, and many more. It’s what the webmaster wants you to do. There is no context, no explanation why and no idea where the links is leading to.
You have to trust the website you are visiting not to deceive you to click its links.
Remember that in the late nineties, before the so-called new economy boom of Amazon, Ebay and the likes, the Internet has been depicted by the sensationalist press as a pool of
- Nazis
- terrorists
- child molesters
Most articles dealing with the Web back then explained that there were tutorials on how to build bombs everywhere on the Web, child pornography abounded, and extremists of all kinds were waiting for you. So clicking a link was scary!!!
That’s why sooner or later people started to use contextual anchor texts. Instead of saying “click here” they would say things like “this idiot” for a blogger they would disagree here, “download now” for a place where a software could be… downloaded and “tasty chicken” for a recipe.
Smart Google engineers recognized the anchor text pattern
and thus made the page linked to as “tasty chicken” rank for [tasty chicken] and [tasty chicken recipe] on their search engine. Unlike early webmasters expressing what they want (click here), modern publishers resorted to offering what the readers want (tasty chicken).
Due to all of those links optimized for “click here”, some sites ranked for [click here] accordingly. For several years it was Adobe on #1. Now, luckily it’s the W3C.
There are many variations of “click here” by now, like
- click me
- click
- link
- go
- here
and all of them have something in common: they offer no clue where you are sending the visitors to and actually make the clicking a hazard.
There are basically two kinds of links today: Contextual links in content and call-to-action links.
- Contextual links are in the best case self-explanatory by giving a preview of where they are leading to, for example: Adobe.com.
- Call-to-Action (CTA) links attempt to entice the readers by promising them something they crave: Create SEO Report.
In the first case you send the people to where they want to go. In the second case you try to convince people to go to where you want them to. You will see that in reality if you can combine both that will be ideal. The “Create SEO Report” example is both contextual and a CTA.
Read More
While “click here” is already considered a major faux pas by most people, its younger cousin “read more” is spreading like a plague all over the Web and nobody seems to care. Until recently, of course, where more people started to cry out and suggest much better alternatives.
You might already recognize some of the issues “read more” has in common with “click here”. There is no context, for example. It usually means read on or view the rest of the article. I know that because I often see such links and have to click them. It could mean something else though. You could read more similar articles. You could read more elsewhere. You could even end up on a page asking you to pay to read more.
Often the whole user experience that requires the addition of “read more” is not optimal.
Why do you need to hide the entire article in the first place? It’s usually because you display teasers on the homepage or a category page. Sometimes there is an overview. In many cases though designers just want to hide the text because it doesn’t “look good” or publishers want to force users to create more page views. Thus “read more” is just a hindrance and bad practice by itself.
Another issue with “read more” is that it’s basically redundant information.
When the “click to view the whole article” is really necessary and is not a UX mistake, make sure that you make either the headline, the image or the entire element clickable , even when you click outside of the text itself.
On the Ahrefs blog homepage the image and the headline lead to the article and the “read more” is only implicit (See above).
In case you assume that your users are not Web-savvy, you could add an arrow, too. Why an arrow? Well, sometimes the content you want to view is only visual. In other words, there is nothing to read so that “read more” sounds silly.
Last but not least, “read more” is a very weak call to action like “click here”. It’s a command and reflects what the webmaster wants the visitor to do. Instead you could entice the people who view the teaser by using a proper call to action like “get [article topic] insights”. Don’t overshadow your real CTA with “read more” replacements though. One CTA per page is the ideal.
Submit
Creative Commons image by Tambako the Jaguar
Are you submissive? Do other people force you to submit often? Do you like to click a button saying “submit” then? Probably not. It’s not only because of the obnoxious wording that makes this call-to-action button so unappealing. The problem is also as in the cases of “click here” and “read more”- that is the lack of context.
A button that is sending something can just say “send” when you want to keep it simple but you’d rather want to be as exact as possible.
People want to rest assured they’ll send the right kind of message when they do it or else they’ll refrain from sending.
Do dispel any doubts people might have by providing a clue of what your visitors might be sending such as “send request”, “suggest link” or even “subscribe now” – all depending on what will actually be sent. In case you have no idea what to say just choose a “send message”. When potential customers are meant to send private information over the scary Web, assure them by saying “send securely” and show an SSL encryption icon nearby.
With large forms and especially with text areas users have to enter longer text into, make sure to provide a preview button first or beside the send button. You can also combine both by saying “preview and send” so that user knows that returning to send is not necessary.
Creative Commons image by Neal Fowler
