Section 26. Create Links to Other Pages

26. Create Links to Other Pages

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

22 Use Yahoo! PageWizards to Create a Page

SEE ALSO

10 About Creating Hyperlinks

21 Sign Up for Services

43 Add Text and Links

One of the great benefits of the Web is the ability to link to multiple other locations that have information your visitor might want to have after looking at your page. You can create the links to other resources yourself with PageBuilder .

Remember, though, that you want to keep people on your site as much as you can, so posting multiple links to other places might not be the best way to do that. When the Web was young, it was a bunch of pages with a paragraph of information each that had 10 links to other sites that had a paragraph each and 10 links on each of those pages. A common thing beginners to the Web do is make too many links and not say enough. Make your site have content. Keep people there reading. Be a resource, not a signpost to other resources.

1.	Select Text to Become a Link Click on the text area in the PageBuilder applet, highlight a word or short phrase in your text, and click on the Link icon. TIP Links should never span multiple lines or have too much content. People need a short summary of what information is provided if a link is followed. Most content authors use more than a word and less than a sentence . Too much information only makes links confusing and makes the reader wonder just what is returned if the link is followed.
2.	Create a Link In the Hot Link dialog box, you can link to a new page by selecting the Web URL from the Link to a Location drop-down box. In the text area next to the drop-down box, enter the address of the page to which you want to link. For example, you might want to link to CNN so that people can get to the latest news from your site, so you would enter www.cnn.com. You can also set the text to link to pictures and files, such as music or Zip files, that you want people to be able to download from your site. One of the more interesting options here is to create a link that sends email from your page. 26. Create Links to Other Pages
3.	Create a Mailto Link To create a link that opens a preaddressed email window from your website, select E-mail from the Link to a Location drop-down box. Instead of adding a URL in the text area, type in the email address for the person or people you want to send email to. If you want to email to more than one person at a time, separate each of the email addresses with a comma. This might be really useful if you are expressing a political position in which you want your visitors to act upon, for example. Say your piece on the page and then give them a link to write to the local council or even a senator or the president. Click OK to set the link.
4.	Make an Image into a Link Double-click on an image. At the bottom of the Select Picture dialog box in the Optional Picture Properties section, you can link to a location and turn the picture into a link just like you can a piece of text. To make a picture a link, click on the Link to a Location drop-down box and select Web URL .