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BOOTLOG
007 18/10/05
BUILDING
A WEBSITE, part 7
HYPERLINKS
It’s no
exaggeration to say that hyperlinks are one of the most important elements of
web pages; they are the glue that binds the Internet together and the one
critical advantage that electronic publishing has over print media.
Virtually
all web pages will have a number of built-in hyperlinks in the shape of the
site navigation buttons but one of the tricks to good web page design is to
incorporate manual hyperlinks, to take your visitors quickly to other parts of
the document, other pages on your site or link them to other web sites.
The mechanics of creating a hyperlink vary from one web authoring package top
another but essentially there are two types of link. The simplest ones are
hyperlinks to other pages on the site, or pages on the Internet and in
virtually all cases all you have to do is highlight the item you want to turn
into a hyperlink, and it could be a one or more words, a graphic or image, and
right-click or select ‘Create Hyperlink’ (or something similar) from the Insert
menu. A dialogue box should open and all you have to do is enter the full URL
of the web page you want to link to, whether it’s on your site or the web. If
you’ve made a character, word or words into a hyperlink it will be underlined.
Most programs have an option to change the colour of the link and underline,
and set a colour change, to indicate that the link has been used.
The
second type of hyperlink is used to link to another part of the page or the
document you are working on. Obviously this should only be used on very long
documents or lists where the location you want the reader to get to is a long
way down the page. It makes more sense to use hyperlinks to link to a specific
location on another page in your web site.
In either
case the ‘Bookmark’ is used to identify
the point on the document or web page that you want to link to. The first step
is to go to the page that you want to link to and create the Bookmark by
highlighting the point on the page you want to link to. It could be a word or
graphic or even an empty space; right click the highlight select Create
Bookmark and you will be asked to give it a name (or use the default name, if
you’ve highlighted a word). Step two is to create the hyperlink that links to
your Bookmark; follow the same procedure as before, highlight the word or
graphic, right click, select Create Hyperlink but this time instead of a URL
choose your newly created Bookmark.
To give you some idea of how and where to use Hyperlinks
and Bookmarks with a web page have a look at the BootLog Glossary. This is
riddled with links to make this rather long document
easier to navigate. As you can see the row of underlined letters across the top
of the page are hyperlinks and these are connected to the large bookmarked
letters at the head of each section. The save readers the effort of scrolling
to the top of the page the words ‘TOP’, sprinkled strategically throughout the
document are bookmarked to a blind character at the top of the page.
When the
Glossary is referred to in another document the trick here is to highlight and
hyperlink the word on the page to the Glossary, and to make it even more user
friendly, add a bookmark to the end of the URL to take the reader directly to
the word or term referred to by adding the hash'#' symbol plus the bookmark code to the end. So for example clicking on this Hyperlink
should
take you to the H section of the Glossary where you will find the
definition.
The actual URL and bookmark for this hyperlink looks like this:
'http://www.rickmaybury.com/links.html#H'. The technique could be
further refined to take the reader to the exact word but
that would involve a great deal more work
It probably
sounds more complicated than it actually is but you will quickly get the hang
of it. If you want some practice you can try it on a Word document, make a link
to another point on a page, and once you are comfortable with that, try hyperlinking
to a bookmark in another word document.
There are
several schools of though on the size of hyperlinks but the most obvious thing
to watch out for is not to make them so short or small that they could be
missed. Long hyperlinks, more than three or four words, say, should also be avoided,
as they tend to look ugly. If you want to make your hyperlinks stand out more
then make the word or characters bold or italic, though again don’t overdo it.
Too many hyperlinks can look horrible too and make long text heavy pages
difficult to read, they can also be quite distracting and if you send your
reader off to too many other locations or websites they might not find their
way back…
Part 8 -- Publishing
and maintaining your site
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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