Beginning: Adding a Link

If you have built your site with SiteBuilder, or are not very experienced with building web pages, you may not know how to add a link to another page or site.

The links are made by using the using the <A> tag. (A tag is a special code that you put in your page that tells the browser to do something.)

The <A> tag has two parts: the opening tag and the closing tag. There is also text (or an image) that go in between the opening and closing tags.

Let's take a look at a simple example:

If you are using SiteBuilder, go to the SiteBuilder and edit the page you want to have bold text. Find the section you want to include the text in, and click on the edit button for that section.

If you are not using SiteBuilder, use a text editor program (like Notepad) to open your file, and find the place you want to put the link.

To make a link to the Freeservers home page, the first thing you would need to do is create the opening tag. It should look like this:

<A HREF="http://www.freeservers.com">

You will notice that there is something other than just "A" inside the tag. HREF= tells your browser where the link should point to.

Now, type the text that you want to appear where the link is:

This is a link to Freeservers!

Finally, you need to tell the browser where the link ends by putting in the closing tag:

</A>

Put it all together and it should look like this:

<A HREF="http://www.freeservers.com">This is a link to Freeservers!</A>

Make sure you save the changes you make. If you preview the page, you will see that the text within the <A> tag is is underlined (and may be a different color) like this:

This is a link to Freeservers!

So go ahead and try these techniques to add some links to other websites.

Now, what if you want to link to a page within your own website? It's exactly the same, except that instead of putting in http:// followed by a domain name, you only put in the page you want to link to.

For example, if you wanted to link to a page called photos.html in the same directory (folder) as the page you are linking from, you would have the following in your opening <A> tag:

<A HREF="photos.html">

It gets a little more complicated if the page is in a subdirectory. For instance, if you have a page called abba.html in a subdirectory called music, you would have the following in your opening <A> tag:

<A HREF="music/abba.html">

What if you want to link back from the abba.html page to a file outside the music subdirectory? You can use the a special code to mean "go up one directory level". The code is ../ (two periods and a slash). So to link to a file called sweden.html in the directoty above, you would have the following in your opening <A> tag:

<A HREF="../sweden.html">

So there you have the basics of linking to other pages and sites from your website. Good luck in building your site!