|Home| |Creating Links| CSS| |Tables| Forms| |Copyright| |Frames| |Graphics
Internal links will take you from one page on a site to another page on that same site.
External links will take you from one page to a page located on another server or website.
Jump links will help you move from one part of a page to another quickly.There are alternative names for links of this nature. These may include names such as "bookmark" (as in Expression Web) or "named anchor". Regardless of what they are called, they still function in the same way.
Absolute URLs include the protocol (http://), the domain name (like bhc.edu), and the file path (/faculty/index.htm) to form a complete url. Relative URLs, on the other hand, only contain a path to a source file. An example of this is ".../contact/email.htm".
When coding links, it's important that you take into consideration what you want the link say, not just where you want it to point to. Here are some helpful guidelines to use when selecting text to use. First, write naturally, but plan for the link's placement. Don't just skip over a space, or leave empty room for it. If you know what you want it to say, by all means enter the text now. Second, place text of the link towards the end of the sentence where possible. You don't want it out in the middle of nowhere.
Make sure the link text is meaningful and obvious - don't have a link say "The Oprah Winfrey Show" when the link goes to the website for "Ellen DeGeneres", that's misleading. Don't use the generic "Click here" - that's overused online and really does not provide any information on the page you are linking to. Lastly, perhaps the most important - Watch how often you use a given piece of text. After a visitor sees "Click here" so many times, it loses its meaning. If you must use a lot of links, consider using something else for your link text. Perhaps after using a "Click here", you can make part of the text itself a link to the specified page. Other problems with this include: it's device-dependant, it lowers search enging rankings (they don't know what "Click here" means), and it makes it less accessible to those who hae visual impairments and use screen readers. Repeated use of "Click here" tells the visually-impaired person nothing about the site they are visiting!
Using a WYSIWYG editor such as Expression Web makes it much easier to maintain the files of your site. Normally, when you make links and then move or rename a file, the link will break when they are saved because that file no longer exists. But if you do this within Expression Web, its site management features will update your links for you automatically. How cool is that?
Here are some links to some HTML resources which you may find useful. Feel free to click on any link to view the content on each site.