Links made easy
Common links
Links to other websites
Links within webpages

Links are an important part of websites. They make it possible to navigate from one section of your website to another or even to other places outside of your website.

Probably one of the most important things about links is to make them as easy to access and understand as possible.

The first links we will talk about are the ones for the various pages on your website. While you can put them anywhere, the most common places are either in a sidebar on the left side of your webpage, or in a bar under the logo/title area at the top of the website. If you do a lot of work on the web, those are the places your visitors will look first. So unless there's a really good reason to put them somewhere else, I'd stick with those two places.

Generally speaking links within the text of the website are identified by being in blue and underlined - like so - common link (and by the way - if you click on that link it won't go anywhere - I've set it to stay on this page).

It is also common for links to change color as you visit them - just makes it handy for you to see where you have been on a website.

Now, you can set links so that they aren't in blue or underlined - for example, the links I have on this web page. The ones shown as "<<< Previous", "Dashboard Main" and "Next >>>". Because they are in the common link area, it's obvious that they are links and so I set them to stay as white letters. Personally I like to play with different colors and designs in the common link areas because I feel those areas are obviously links, and people understand that.

However, I very much prefer to leave any links in the rest of the webpage areas in the common link color and underlined. Don't make it difficult for your visitor to figure out if something is a link or not.

Speaking of which, it's also a good idea not to use underlining in your text, as it can be confused for a link. It's far better to use bolding or italic or color changes to the letters instead. (More about that in the Text section.)

There is something else you will want to be aware of if you have links on your website that take the visitor to another website. You don't want the visitor to leave your website until they are done with what they came to find out. However, sometimes you may have good reason to send them somewhere else, so what you want to do with those links is to have them open in a new window. So for example, in the Colors section of this module, I sent you to check out some color pages, ie, this Color Chart. Go ahead and click on the link. You will see that it opens up a new window. That way you can check out what you want on that website and when you exit it, you will be back at the website you originally came from.

Within a website, you would just set the links to go from one page or section to another in the same window - which is what happens if you click on the "<<< Previous", "Dashboard Main" and "Next >>>" links.

There are some other link possibilities - like sending someone from a list at the top of the page to a section further down on the page. (I've done a sample list at the top of this page - go ahead and click on them to see how they take you to those sections of this page.) That's handy if you have a really long page of information. What you might also want on a page like that is a link at stages along the page that takes the reader back to the top of the page. Like this - Back to the TOP.

One other thing about links - you can also use images as links. I use that in the Sample Websites section at the end of this module. Which you can go to by clicking on this image (which I have set to open in a new window so that you don't lose your place here):