Just Google It

Every now and then when I get stuck on how I want something to look, I'll just google it, and look at what other people are doing. Today I've been working on a revamped Useful Links page for my new website.

The reason that I am changing the style of the page itself is that the way it's set up now is in a 3 column page, with a navigation panel on the left, content in the middle, and my picture on the right. For the new site, the right-most column will only be on the homepage, nowhere else. So I'm changing the setup of the links page to use all the extra space that it's now going to have.

I got stuck on the design though, because I've decided that the current setup, while modern looking, is also not as useful, because the links aren't immediately apparent. Using red non-underlined text for links isn't normal at all, and while block highlighting looks pleasant, it's also confusing. Because of this, I'm going to be changing to a more classic style of links for the new page. I tried just basic blue, and that looked okay ... but the purple of visited links didn't fit at all.

Stuck, I went to Google and searched for "useful links", and the results were mainly the links pages or a random collection of websites ... exactly what I was looking for. The methods vary widely, but one method technique which I thought looked really nice was used by Clemson University. The links don't change color, and the color fits the scheme.

The purple they use doesn't fit with my own color scheme at all, but I've got an off color blue which does, and by removing the change to purple for visited, I think I've solved the problem. Thank you Clemson University.