One of the most challenging aspects of web design is to find a design that is appealing but also effective. It seems that often these two requirements are mutually exclusive.

We have an art site that has a large number of daily visitors. It is the greatest tool for testing all sorts of ideas since with over 60k weekly visitors you can get a very quick turn around on your tests. One test we ran was to try different colors and formats of the links on the page. Initially, the links on the site were a muted blue and not underlined. We evaluated a variety of colors, with and without underlines, and the one that won hands down was a much brighter blue that was underlined. Overall, we saw an improvement of about 15% in the average number of pages viewed and the average time on site – both really good things.

The design folks felt that the underlines didn’t work as well with the overall look and feel of the site, and truthfully, I agreed that it looked cleaner before. However, more page views means that our customers are getting more value and enjoyment from the site and likely finding it less confusing and easier to use, so the underlines win.