Creating Basic Links

by Randall S. Davis

"The Internet is transitory, ever changing, reshaping and remolding itself."

- Beginners' Central

[BACK TO COURSE]

CHAT HANDOUTS LINKS SEARCH STUDENTS TESTS TOOLS VOCAB HELP

What are links?
How to you create them?
What are some extra things I can do with links?

Purpose of Lesson:

You should be able to create links to other Web pages on your site and to other places on the Web.

What are links?

Links allow you to move from one page to another on the Web. These pages could be on your site or to remote locations.

How do you create links?

Here are the parts of a link and what they would look like on your page:

<A HREF="hlink.html">Creating Links</A>

Creating Links

A stands for Anchor. It begins the link to another page on your own site or to a file in a remote location.
HREF stands for Hypertext REFerence.
hlink.html is the "relative" URL to the file. That is, this linked page is located on the same site, and the link points to location of the file in relationship to itself. Therefore, if you are link to a page in another directory on your site (link your "images" directory), the link would look like this:
<A HREF="images/hlink.html">Creating Links</A>
Creating Links
If the page you were linking to is found on a remote site, you would use an "absolute" URL, or the entire URL address. It would appear something like this:
<A HREF="http://www.eslnetworld.com/hlink.html">Creating Links</A>
Write the text you want to appear where you see "Creating Links.".
/A is the closing tag for the link.

To create an e-mail link, you would use the code below:

<A HREF="mailto:esl_lab@hotmail.com">Randall S. Davis</A>

Randall S. Davis

Since some people like to print out the pages for future reference, it is a good idea to write your e-mail address in the link so that it shows up on the printed page like this:

esl_lab@hotmail.com

You will need a link at the top of your page that points to the students' pages for this class. The link should appear something like this at the top of the page:

<html>
<head>
<title>Randall Davis</title>
</head>
<BODY BACKGROUND="images/notebook.gif" BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" LINK="#6633FF" VLINK="#FF0099">
<center><A HREF="http://www.eslnetworld.com/students/">ELI Student Pages</A></center>
<HR>
<center><h1>Randall Davis</h1></center>
</body>
</html>

Take a look at this sample page.

What are some extra things I can do with links?

Next lesson!