Thanks for your input!

I can’t even begin to imagine how many times I’ve cursed the person making the decision to not style visited links in the body or a list navigation — or set the link colour so close to the text colour that they can only be spotted by the underline (you included, Robert). And a completely different hue is terrible too — like :link is green and :visited is red!

Visited links should be set in a duller look than its not visited state, as it’s proven to be the easiest to understand (according to a study which I can’t locate now). If you don’t want a desaturated and brighter variant of your link colour you can use a neighbouring colour to achieve the dulled look (such as the classical blue to darker purple).

Locating links and understanding them should not be something that your visitor has to think about, but sadly link styling is one of the worst skills amongst web designers (amateurs and pros alike).

Recommended reading: http://www.useit.com” rel=”nofollow”>Guidelines for Visualizing Links, by Jakob Nielsen in 2004.

I agree that there are cases when it is indeed a good thing, but other situations where it doesn’t help at all. And, as all seem to agree about, this goes for links in the copy text and such cases. Changed color in a web site’s navigation would just be weird in almost all cases.

I’ve noticed the strike-through examples and tick images following visited links too, and I like the creativity (although strike-through can, as displayed by Ross above, become very unfit).

And yes, just slight color changes for visited links, usually gray-ish, can actually look good and help the visitor.

Visited links are very useful on social network sites like magnolia and digg. This way if you’ve already visited the page via one site, you don’t have to spend any clicks on it at the other site.

But for most business sites I think you’re right that they don’t add very much.

I would think that it would be rather difficult to work out which the good one is because you can’t really read the text.

Get the idea :>

In regards to the strike through that Tanny mentioned, I agree that it can be a good idea. I have seen other methods like tick icons that do look ok.

I think it all depends on the design on which method you go with however.

I believe Jakob Nielsens studies in this field has proven that there is a usability gain in having visited links turn up in another fashion.

On forums like SitePoint, where there are hundreds of new threads every day, I find it absolutely invaluable to be able to see which ones I’ve looked at.

The research I’ve seen on this subject indicates that most users find it helpful to see which links they’ve already visited. Elderly users and people with minor cognitive disabilities are two of the groups who can benefit most from this.

If you’re worried about the colour scheme, you can use a less saturated nuance of the unvisited link colour, as long as the contrast to the background remains sufficient.

For general links on a site (navigation, footer, add comment, etc) I would agree that adding another color for visited state only causes confusion. I tend to avoid changing link color (or link style) for any reason within main content areas (except on hover, of course). This consistency helps to reinforce to users that text in this color (e.g. red) and with this style (e.g. underline) has an additional action associated with it.

Instead of a different color, have you thought about strike through? The first time I saw it at CSS Zen Garden (Samuraai) it really made sense. Of course that’s in the context of CSS Zen Garden.

I particularly find them useful when someone has a long list of resources - say 20 presentations on web standards or something - and I am going through them either systematically or in an ad-hoc way. If the list is not displayed in that way it gets very difficult to not miss and sometimes repeat links when I’m visiting them and returning to the list.

I have to admit on my site I don’t use visited but I have on some clients sites in the past to reasonable effect from a usability standpoint.

I see your point about the design factor but its also a common view on why they can’t provide skip links visually… so I don’t know. I think a lot of it comes down to context and judgement call on the specific project. Also, I’ve tended to say to myself it is one of those things which can so easily be tweaked - if it is identified as an issue then its a 10 second find and fixer. So sometimes it just never eventuated as being identified.

If I were visiting a large government site like a Business Access Point - mmm definately give me visited links. The circularity of some larger government / corporate sites makes me hit red within about 3 - 4 pages when the cycle starts. Australian Bureau of Statistics might think of using them (my recent experience). But maybe its their IA that is confusing me too.

Accessibility? While displaying information using colour alone is not good I think they do enhance the accessibility of a page (or some pages) for some users perhaps.

So they’re worth looking at using. I’d recommend using them but with the caveat that it really depends on the information on your site (and feedback). For example although blogs have lists of archive by month I rarely troll them one by one myself, and articles may only have one or two links.

Just my 2 cents worth I guess.