Will anyone notice if my webpages link to themselves
One of Jakob Nielson’s “Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines” written back in 2003 was that a webpage should “never have a link that points to the current page”. Many users have a simple mental model of the web, and why shouldn’t they? When they click a hypertext link they expect to go somewhere else. When they don’t go anywhere at all, this simple expectation is boken and the user gets confused.
At best, if there is a clear page heading, good navigation and if they are already at the top of the page then the unfortunate user might realise that nothing has happened and that they would be better off trying another link. However, if they are already scrolled down the page a little when they click the offending link, the affect of the page reload moving the page to the top may hide the fact that they haven’t actually gone anywhere. It’s only when they start reading again that they realise that site has wasted their time. If indicators of the users’ current position in the website are poor e.g. unclear headers/navigational elements then this may also have a similar adverse effect on their experience. We have seen this confusion on many an occasion during our usability testing at optimum.web.
Despite this clear usability issue and the fact that it can have a more serious affect on users of assistive technologies like screen readers, very few sites have tackled the problem. I think thie consequenses of this usability issue are one of the least understood and lowest on the list of things to put right. But actually this issue should be the easiest for developers of the CMS’s to resolve through a few global changes to the code.
Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to find anything on the subject for solving the problem in your CMS’s or blogs. There was only one reference I could find in trying to resolve the issue in the blogging/CMS application, Wordpress: Removing Menu Links to the Current Page
Observations, Experiences, Accessibility, Usability