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Part 7 - More Linking

© Tracy Ryan

The last article covered the basics of hyperlinks. This involved creating links to other pages within your own website, and also links to other websites that may be of interest to your readers.

Now we're going to look at the other types of links we can create. Not only can you link to other websites or other pages in your own website, but you can link to sections of the same page, and you can create email links as well.

Firstly we'll look at how to create internal links.

If you have a great deal of information on the one page, you might like to link between different sections on that same page. To do this, you use internal links. The first thing you need to do when setting up these types of links is to create an "anchor". Remember we mentioned anchors in the last article? Here is where we actually use them!

The anchor is a piece of "behind the scenes" html code that is placed on the page where you wish the link to lead to. It's not actually visible on the page.

The HTML you would use to place an anchor is...

Anchor Text

The "Anchor Text" can be a sub heading on your page, it could be just the first word of a new paragraph, or even any word or sentence at all on the page that you might wish to create a link to.

Now the anchor has been placed, you will wish to link to it.

All you need to do is to create a link in the regular way, with one exception. Instead of a URL in the link code, you place the anchor name, with a hash (#) before it. I'm sure this sounds complicated, but it's not.

It would look like this:

Link Text

Of course you can also use image links, as described in the last article (Part 6), in which case it would look like this:

(Refer to article 6 for more information about image links)

Now, you might well be asking where you would use anchor links such as these.

Well, basically you'd use them anywhere that you have multiple sections on the one page. An example might be something like an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list. You've probably seen sites that have these where they list the questions at the top of the page, and then the answers in order underneath. Clicking on a question will take you to the part of the page that has the relevant answer.

The copyright of the article Part 7 - More Linking in Website Creation is owned by Tracy Ryan. Permission to republish Part 7 - More Linking in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.