: How to distinguish menu items that link to other sites I work for a large university, and we're trying to come up with some ideas for our drop-down menus, which are fairly standard, not too

@Alves566

Maybe having an icon about subject or logo or theme of the external site representing will help.

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@Angie364

Why not put all of the external links in to one dropdown list entitled Partners or similar, and use all of the subtle indicators suggested in this post?

I won't pretend any of these are my own ideas, they come from all of the others on this post. I've just added the twist of putting it in to its own dropdown menu, because to me, that makes much more sense than mixing it in with the internal navigation.



With all of the indicators combined, I think it's quite obviously saying 'These links go outside of the site', or simply, 'These links are different, once you click on them you'll see why'.

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@Smith574

If you have to include each one on a site why not create a multi-color navigation panel that uses the colors for each site if they are different. Clicking the top level will target a new page to the site, but also allow for drop down navigation with the color styled as the background or do a solid line on the left or right to still indicate that you're in the site.

Something maybe like this but I would use a simple line on the bottom instead of a solid color background:



If you're required to list all of these I would also add a Sitemap in the footer for easy access.

From a personal web design perspective, I would target each site possibly as a pre-header at the top that doesn't use a dropdown but a target="_blank to the site. This will help with a better experience and then just code the footer for each site with the site as the header and the links below it with each site's main navigation panel. Generate a post-footer option with a link to Sitemap

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@Murray976

I'd simply use a small, unobtrusive "New Window" icon....

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@BetL875

You should certainly give them a different appearance somehow (it could be almost anything, so long as it's consistent on all the sites), but accompany it with title="Opens a different website in a new window so the message pops up as a tooltip on hover. You could also take the visitor to an intermediate page that tells them they're leaving the current site.

Unless you've a compelling reason not to, I would also recommend making all such links target="_blank", to minimize the confusion.

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