Designing “Read More” And “Continue Reading” Links
Use Buttons
If you really want your “Read more” link to stand out, use a button. Some websites have images or CSS-styled text. Just keep in mind that too many buttons can overwhelm the audience, so use them in moderation.
Trends
Seeing what everyone else is doing before you start designing a website is always important. You may want to know in order to conform to the current trend, or you may just want to buck the trend. Either way, putting your finger in the air from time to time to see which way the wind is blowing is valuable.
While researching material for this article, we discovered several interesting trends*:
- Text-only links were used more than any other type of “Read More” link by a ratio of almost 2 to 1.
- Most websites used the wording “Read More” or some variation of it.
- Text-only links or text combined with an icon were used mostly on blogs, while buttons were used primarily on commercial websites.
* These observations are not scientific and reflect only the websites showcased in this article, not the Internet in general.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this article has given you some insight into how best to display your “Read more” text. Clearly, you can entice readers to click on links in several ways, and some methods work better than others. In observing other websites, we found that many of them prefer to keep their links simple. Some websites have brightly colored links or bolded text, others have icons or even buttons to make their links stand out. Either way, designers prefer to keep their “Read more” text brief, with only one-third of them using some variation of the word “Continue.” There could be several reasons for this, the most likely being that the words “Continue reading” just have too many characters.
We also found that blogs were more likely to use text links, while commercial websites were more likely to use buttons. The reason for this isn”t exactly clear, but owners of commercial websites may feel buttons attract users more to their products, while publishers of text-heavy blogs prefer to keep things simple, so as not to overwhelm readers.
In the end, you are limited only by your creativity and imagination. Do whatever works best for the website you are working on, and the design will likely work because of it.