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Part 6 - The Missing Link: Hyperlinks

© Tracy Ryan

By now you should have a decent web page underway. You can format your text to 'pretty' it up, you can add pictures and so on. But as you progress with your website, you'll be wanting to have more than just one page. You might want to add different sections to your site and have each of these on different pages, or you might even want to make reference to other related websites or even list your own favourite websites. This is where hyperlinks come into the picture.

There's really only one way to create a hyperlink on your page, but there are a few variations on how you can have it work. Basically, the format is as follows:

LINK

A stands for 'anchor' (we'll cover more about anchors in a later article)
HREF stands for hypertext reference
And LINK is the way your link will appear on the web page. Ie, what the person viewing your page will click on to access the link. It can be a sentence, a word or even an image.

First, we'll cover the basics using a text link and then we'll apply what you've learned to produce some picture links.

As I've already mentioned, our basic format that we'll be working with is:

LINK

So if we wanted to add a link to, say, the second page of your website, we could do it the following way...

This is a link to the second page of my site

OR, we could link using only one or two words in that sentence, rather than having the whole thing as a link. That would look like...

This is a link to the second page of my site.

That example had only the word "This" being the hyperlink, and the rest of the sentence was just a regular line of text.

That works for pages in your own website, but if you want to link to a site on another server, say SUITE101, you would need to use the full address.

Click here to visit SUITE101.

Click here to visit SUITE101.

Or for a smaller link of just a few words...

Click here to visit SUITE101.

Click here to visit SUITE101.

You need to include the "http://" part when doing this. If you start the address with "www" and forget the first part, then the link won't work. It's important to remember this if you want people to get to the other site!

The copyright of the article Part 6 - The Missing Link: Hyperlinks in Website Creation is owned by Tracy Ryan. Permission to republish Part 6 - The Missing Link: Hyperlinks in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.