Adding a Link to a Web Page

Question:
How do you place a link between your web site and another web site?

Answer:
Placing a link that points to another location on your web site can be either simple or difficult depending on your tools and experience. I will explain one way of doing this by using a plain text editor. In other words you will not need any specialized software to accomplish this.

First let’s go back to the basics. HTML, which stands for hypertext mark-up language was designed, as many other mark-up languages to make the elements on a page appear visually distinguished. With the exception of a few tags all have the same basic formula:

<tag>content</tag>

Examples:
<b>some bold text</b>
<center>centered content</center>

The <tag> starts the definition, and the </tag> ends the definition.

A web link, hyper link, anchor link, etc. can be rendered on a browser by the special pair of tags <a></a>.

On an HTML editor such as Front Page, Dreamweaver, HoTMetaL, that is WYSIWYG all you would have to do is place your cursor where you want the link invoke the link editor and fill in the blanks. Once you supply all the parameters a hyper-link takes. The link is magically inserted in the page.

OK. Now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for: inserting a link into your web page. Start by opening your favorite TEXT editor (Avoid WYSIWYG programs like Word.) I suggest Notepad. A full web page will look ominous and if large enough will be almost unmanageable in Notepad. But, for this example it’s perfect.

Let us begin with a snippet of content: “Click here to see my other page.” Type it into your notepad and save it as “webpage.htm” use the quotes otherwise your document will be saved as webpage.htm.txt by default. We want the htm extension the document will behave as a web page when you double click on it.

Minimize your notepad, and double click on your new webpage.htm to test it. Your default browser should open with the page and all you should see is “Click here to see my other page.” Now go back to the notepad document and edit it to look like this:

Click <a href=” http://askjuan.net/quandan/ ”>here</a> to see my other page.

Save your document. Switch over to the web browser and refresh.

Now you should see: “Click here to see my other page.” The word “here” has become the link to the other page. If you click on it, it will take you to the page specified by the quotes after href=. That is all it takes. Use this method to insert links into your web pages.

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