The main pattern used in nearly every site (grid and non grid) was the “title, thumbnail, short summary, more link” pattern. This pattern is generally used for indexing blog post summaries in sidebars, listing services, or creating small calls-to-action.

However, only those small bits of sporadic content were clickable. Sure it’s not that hard for the user to hover over one of the three links, but the user experience could be improved.

Leevi Graham felt that a user should be able to click anywhere in the content and navigate through to the target page — basically making the whole content block one big link. He came up with a jQuery Plugin called BigTarget.js with the following concept.

  • Attach the plugin to any link in the content block.
  • Pass through the click zone selector as a plugin option.
  • The plugin then attaches onclick and hover events to the click zone.
  • User clicks anywhere on the click zone.
  • The original link href is retrieved.
  • If the link has a rel attribute and it’s set to ‘external’, open the link target in a new window; otherwise open the link in the current browser window.

Requirements: jQuery Javascript Framework
Demo: http://newism.com.au/blog/post/58/bigtarget-js-increasing…
License: License Free