Let's learn about links.
It's really very simple. We'll make a link to Yahoo.
Start with this...
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Go to Yahoo!
</BODY>
Go to Yahoo! |
Then add a pair of anchor tags.
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Go to <A>Yahoo!</A>
</BODY>
Add the URL and you're done! URL Stands for
Universal Resource Locator. That's a big fancy phrase that the
computer people came up with. They tend to do that a lot. A URL is
just an address.
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Go to <A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com/">Yahoo!</A>
</BODY>
Let's do one more.
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Go to Netscape!
</BODY>
|
Go to Netscape! |
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Go to <A HREF="http://home.netscape.com/">Netscape!</A>
</BODY>
An email link works the same way. We just
use an email address instead of a page address.
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Send me <A HREF="mailto:jaffriahmed@yahoo.com">Mail!</A>
</BODY>
We can make an image a link if we want.
Using the 'Go to Netscape!' example above we simply substitute an <IMG>
tag for the word Netscape!
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Go to <A HREF="http://home.netscape.com/"><IMG
SRC="copper.gif" WIDTH=82 HEIGHT=68></A>
</BODY>
Go to  |
A frequent question I get is how do you
get rid of that annoying blue border around the image when you make
it a link? Simple...
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
Go to <A HREF="http://home.netscape.com/"><IMG
SRC="copper.gif" WIDTH=82 HEIGHT=68 BORDER=0></A>
</BODY>
|
Go to |
One more note about links... It is perfectly acceptable to link
to someone's pages without asking. Links are what makes the Web the Web.
When you include images on your page,
remember that they contain a lot of data and therefore can be slow
to load. One way to reduce the size (by size I mean Kb) is to reduce
the dimensions. Cutting the length and width in half results in an
image only 1/4 the size in Kb. Also you can reduce the number of
colours. For example:
 |
 |
Dimensions 272 x 394
# of colors- 229
Size- 21.5 Kb |
Dimensions 144 x 269
# of colors- 15
Size (in Kb)- 4.7 Kb |
All image editing was done with Adobe Photoshop!
Now granted, the first one is a better quality picture,
but think of it this way... if your page takes forever to load your
visitors will probably leave and they won't see anything.
Gif Wizard and Adobe Photoshop are
very helpful tools that will help you reduce the size of your
images.
Another option that can be used if you want
to offer a lot of imagery is to provide thumbnails that link
to larger versions of the image. Let's suppose that I want to offer
three very nice pictures of let's say a few of my cars (I wish).
Click on the thumbnail to see a larger image
The first thing you need to do is fire up your image editor and
make smaller versions of your images. It would also help to reduce
the colour depth. This bit about making a smaller version is very
important. I have seen many instances of someone trying to make a
thumbnail by simply reducing its dimensions in the <IMG>
tag. All this does is load the full image into a smaller space. What
you need to do is create a smaller copy of the image and use
that as a link to the big image.
Let's do one. I think we'll use the Corvette (that's the blue one
if there's anyone out there that for some silly reason doesn't
know). Put the full sized image and the small image in your working
folder. Once again, Netscape users right click & save as.
Start with your <IMG> tag.
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<IMG SRC="car1a.gif" WIDTH=87
HEIGHT=60>
</BODY>
Add your <A> tags.
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<A><IMG SRC="car1a.gif"
WIDTH=87 HEIGHT=60></A>
</BODY>
And add the URL and you're done!
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<A HREF="pic2"><IMG
SRC="car1a.gif" WIDTH=87 HEIGHT=60></A>
</BODY>
You can, if you want, get rid of the blue border. Although, you
may wish to keep it so that your viewers know that it is a link.
It's up to you.
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<A HREF="pic2"><IMG SRC="car1a.gif"
WIDTH=87 HEIGHT=60 BORDER=0></A>
</BODY>
Another way to link is to link not
just to a page, but to a specific part of a page. Click here
to be magically transported to where we first talked about URLs.
Since it would be kind of hard to have you build an example, I'll
just do the best I can to explain how it's done.
First start with the spot you want people to be transported to.
Pick a word and wrap it in the <A> tags.
<A>Add</A>
the URL and you're done!
Next give that spot a NAME.
<A NAME="upabit">Add</A>
the URL and you're done!
What you have done is marked that spot. Now it can be referenced.
Now start building the link.
Click <A>here</A>
to be magically transported...
Add the document to be referenced...
Click <A HREF="les4.html">here</A>
to be magically transported...
And lastly, add the anchor NAME like so...
Click <A HREF="les4.html#upabit">here</A>
to be magically transported...
And that's all there is to it! Not exactly brain surgery is it??
