How to create a link to another page. It’s a set tag format like any of the others you have seen so far. Once you learn the format, you can make as many links as you want to any other page you want.
(<A href=”http://www.emilygaston.com” mce_href=”http://www.emilygaston.com”>Click Here For WebPage Authoring</A>)
Here’s What’s Happening
- A stands for Anchor. It begins the link to another page.
- HREF stands for Hypertext REFerence. That’s a nice, short way of saying to the browser, “This is where the link is going to go.”
- http://www.emilygaston.com is the FULL ADDRESS of the link. Also notice that the address has an equal sign in front of it and is enclosed in quotes. Why? Because it’s an attribute of the Anchor tag, a command inside of a command.
- Where it reads “WebPage Authoring” is where you write the text you want to appear on the page. What is in that space will appear on the page for the viewer to click. So, write something that denotes the link.
- /A ends the entire link command.
This is what’s known as a mailto: command. It follows the same coding scheme as the hypertext link above. What this format does is place blue wording on the screen that people can click to send you a piece of e-mail.
Here’s the pattern:
<A HREF=”mailto:sales@emilygaston.com”>Click Here To Write Me</A>
Notice it’s the same format as a link except in a link you write “mailto:” in place of the http:// and your e-mail address in place of the page address. Yes, you still need the </A> tag at the end. Please notice there is NO SPACE between the colon and the e-mail address.
However, please be very careful when using this, for two reasons:
- If the person only has an internet based email account, and hasn’t configured an email program on their computer (e.g. if you use Hotmail or Gmail instead of Microsoft Outlook) then it will open their program for email for the first time and try to walk them through setting it up. This isn’t a good idea if they’re new to using computers…
- There are now little programs called ‘bots’ which wander round the internet looking for email addresses to send spam to. If you don’t want to receive them, then one part of this is not publishing your address on your website. Try using a contact form or think long and hard before you use a mailto!
