Underlining hyperlinks -- should I not do this?

I never really considered NOT having hyperlinks underlined, until I saw a site that didn't use it. It looked reallycool! They had a lot of links, and without all the underlining, it actually looked quite clear and crisp. I'm thinking about doing this with my own site, but I wanted to get opinions. Should I? What are the drawbacks? Positives? I know it'll make my site look less cluttered, especially on the pages where I have a lot (as in a few hundred) links (no, it's not a link farm, it's an archive to individual pages). But then again, new Internet users NEED underlined links to know that it's a link, right? And not having underlines might confuse them.

Thoughts?

 

Depends on your audience. If you get not-so-savvy users, stick to underlined links. Makes navigating a lot easier.

If you do get rid of them, make sure they still stand out.

 

if you are going to scrap underlining, make sure you do it with css,
otherwise mozilla will put them straight back again.

GEM

 

Ya, to make sure users still know its a link, simply change the font-weight to bold, or change the color a bit.

I like having links that only underline on rollover..


Josh

 

I agree that it depends on your audience and how you set it up. For one of our sites we "Do" underline hyperlinks and for another we "Do Not".

With that said... when a visitor views our site which "Does Not" underline hyperlinks I don't think it will take him/her too long to figure out what's going on.

We've set up our CSS so that the links are traditional Blue and bolded to stand out against the Black text. When the visitor hovers over a hyperlink the text is underlined and the color changes to red.

So far, we haven't had any visitor mention any difficulties with this set up.

 

Bear in mind that, from a usability aspect, there is a significant portion of people who are color blind. Without underlines, they will have a much tougher time navigating your site.

 

Yeah I'm going to keep the underline. A large portion of my visitors aren't "tech heads" and they might get confused.

 

I think underlining is unnecessary with standard-blue links, as these are almost universally recognised. Any other link style depends on your target audience, as others have said.

 

Underlining may be omitted where it's obvious that any text can be clicked on (e.g. navigation menus). When a link is in the middle of text, removing underlining will make it harder to see whether it's just a highlighted word (it's quite often used in docs) or a link.

J.D.

 

I can't understand why people wouldn't underline a link. Isn't that what a web page consists of? A page without clear links would really confuse me.

 

i would keep an non-underlined links in blue so users know its a link. yahoo does this i think.