Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 219618

Summary:	Pervasive use of 'here' instead of meaningful link names
Product:	Community	Reporter:	Karl Trygve Kalleberg <karltk>
Component:	Website	Assignee:	phoenix.ui <phoenix.ui-inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	ian.skerrett, nathan
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:

Description Karl Trygve Kalleberg

2008-02-20 11:38:41 EST

Build ID: N/A

Steps To Reproduce:
Many of the important pages on the eclipse.org site use the word 'here' as a link name instead of a meaningful description of where the link leads to. 

This is very bad style, as experienced web users will let their eyes flow from link to link until they find what they are looking for -- if one can avoid reading all the text in between, then all the better; this is impossible when many important links are all called 'here'.

One example, from the page: 

http://archive.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/index.php

"Current builds are available here. Looking for the build schedule or build stats then look here. For information about different kinds of builds look here."

In the original page, this paragraph contained three links, all named 'here'. This is totally silly. The word 'here' cannot possibly be so important as to deserve being highlighted.

I would rather suggest that the words "Current builds", "build schedule" and "different kinds of builds" be made into links. 

This problem seems quite pervasive on the eclipse.org site, but I would at least ask that the most-trafficked packages (download pages?) be rewritten slightly. It's a quick enough fix once the author is aware of it.

Comment 1 Nathan Gervais

2008-02-20 11:57:33 EST

Personally i don't have much of a problem with linking the word here.  I think its exactly the action we want users to take.

Take a look at this article http://www.copyblogger.com/click-here/.  It's convinced me that links that say Click here or here are indeed valid and useful.

Comment 2 Karl Trygve Kalleberg

2008-02-20 12:04:29 EST

I'm probably misunderstanding your argument, because it doesn't make much sense to me to encourage a web user to "click here" on a link. I know it's a link. I know I need to click it in order to follow it. What I want to know is where it leads, and that's why I think the word 'here' is bad: it doesn't tell me where I'm headed. 

For all their other faults, I have to agree with about.com on this one:

http://webdesign.about.com/od/usability/a/aa012306.htm

I don't want to spend time reading a page when I know what I want -- I'm just looking for which action to take, and if that action is highlighted, that'll make my day so much better. That's particularly acute in the case of download pages. 

At least this is one eclipse.org user's opinion:)

Comment 3 Ian Skerrett

2008-02-20 12:09:32 EST

(In reply to comment #2)
> At least this is one eclipse.org user's opinion:) 
> 

I actually agree that using 'here' is so passee for web design.   However, a lot of people are involved in building the web pages at Eclipse, so it is difficult to enforce something like this. 

The specific page you reference is actually created by the Platform team.  Maybe someone on that team could respond and if they agree take the initiative to address it.

Comment 4 Denis Roy

2008-02-20 13:17:01 EST

I totally agree with Karl.  I think there's a huge difference between that page's use of 'here'  vs. the Web Marketing 101 technique of Click Here (presumably to entice you to buy something).

I've been lobbing tomatoes at that entire page layout, content and design for decades.  See bug 208422.

Actually, I think we can simply close this bug as a duplicate of bug 208422 and add the comments about the multiple 'here' there.  Karl do you agree?

Comment 5 Karl Trygve Kalleberg

2008-02-20 15:40:30 EST

Makes sense to me.

Comment 6 Denis Roy

2008-02-20 16:48:59 EST


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 208422 ***