[thelist] 'Click here'

[Erika Meyer]

>However, I'm beginning to wonder (much as I hate it - think fingernails
>and blackboards) whether the Click Here fungus is becoming a standard
>(through the insistence of  PHBs who consider themselves creative writers),
>and therefore more usable than more sensible hypertext.

I don't think it is more usable.  If you have to use "click here" to 
get the idea across, you are almost certainly being a lazy, bad, 
disingenuous writer.  If you are writing, lazy, bad, disingenuous 
text, you are almost certainly having difficulty communicating ideas 
through your text.  If you are having difficulty communicating ideas 
through text, your site is probably not as usable as a site that 
employs clear, concise, communicative text.

The strongest communicative words are active nouns.  Next strongest are verbs.

"click" is a verb.   But there are many other verbs in the English 
language, and if they are strong, and if your nouns are specific, and 
if links are good key words or terse pithy phrases that are 
underlined & blue, users will get the idea.

When you repeat something more than a couple of times, the user's 
brain goes numb.  If there's nothing but "click here" here, there & 
everywhere, it becomes nothing but noise.

Erika