Blue Links In A Web 2.0 World

Should all things blue on the web be links and all links on the web be blue? While in the offline world green means go, in the online world it is a well recognized convention that blue is our cue to click. But with the ever-evolving web, how is this standard faring?

• Corporate Sites. The vast majority of enterprise sites I looked at adhered to the law of blue links - Microsoft, HP, Cisco, IBM, and Intel. The anomaly was Oracle.
  

• News Sites. CNN.com, CNET, NYTimes.com, and WSJ.com all sported blue links.
  

• Consumer Sites. Amazon, Apple, eBay, MSN.com, Yahoo, Google, Walmart, and Petsmart are all bullish on blue. An exception I found was Target.com.

• Social Media Sites. YouTube, Flickr, My Space, Facebook all maintain blue links. But popular blogs HuffingtonPost, TMZ.com, and tech rag ValleyWag.com don't have blue links.

• Politicking Sites. HillaryClinton.com, BarackObama.com, and even JohnMcCain.com have blue links. So, clearly this rule transcends political persuasions too.

Of course, it also depends on the type of links, positioning, context, etc.. I am, of course, referring to the standard body copy links. Some sites even omit the border="0" on images thereby rendering the blue border on images to illustrate their clickability. Many sites use multi-formatting on their links to visually communicate their click states. And these links can come in all shades of blue. There is the Intel blue, big blue IBM's blue, and the Microsoft blue. Blue links are in fact the defacto fail-safe color of choice for links. Even usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, follows this model.

Does this mean that sites with non-blue links are doomed? Not at all. While it is the color of choice for links, links are popularly manifested in a myriad of colors. Many well-known sites have successfully accomplished this. It is the implementation of those links to appear as links - either by way of underlining or some other visual cue such as a symbol - that become important but such links can and do work. A lot may depend on the target audience and genre of site. There are many examples of Web 2.0 sites and teen sites that do different things that work as well. But tread carefully with this before deviating from the norm.