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Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks allow a user to go:

Accessibility:
Do not use the text 'Click here' as it does not inform your user of what the hyperlink is about. 'Click here' does not encourage the learner to think about what is to come while the page is loading.

Consider: The Moreton Bay Wetlands are an area of international significance.

Rather than: Click here to see the Moreton Bay Wetlands.

External Hyperlinks

External hyperlinks link to another website or to other parts of the Internet

The tag to add a hyperlink to another website is:

<a href='insert the url here'>Insert meaningful link text</a>

For example: Will display like this:
<a href='http://www.google.com'>Search engine - Google</a> Search engine - Google
When using this tag replace the website address for – http://www.google.com – with your intended website address.

Legal issues:
Permission needs to be obtained before deep linking to external websites (linking to a page other than the site's homepage). This permission is sometimes given on a special permissions page within the external site.

For example, on the Microsoft® copyright permission page it states that deep linking to their site is permissible.

Go to the EQ Publishing site to see information on External linking.

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Internal Hyperlinks

Internal hyperlinks can be either to another page within your site or to a section within the same page but further down the page.

Linking to another page within the course

If you were linking to another page within the same site use:

<a href='page1.html'> Moreton Bay Wetlands </a>

Blackboard note:
If you want to link to sections within Blackboard you will need to find out the URL of these pages.

For example: To create a link to Course Documents. Right click on the Course Documents button in the left-hand menu. Select the option to open the page in a new window. Now you copy the link from the address field in your browser. To add the link:

Go to <a href=' …paste link here… '>Course Documents</a> to view the course outline.

Links within a webpage (anchored hyperlinks)

You can create hyperlinks that jump to points within a webpage by using anchors. Allowing someone to 'surf' your document or page requires two key ingredients:

The link - the word to click on - 'Jump word' <a href='#target'>Put jump word here</a>
The anchor - the place to link to - 'Jump location' <a name='target'>Put jump location here</a>

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For example, if you have a long essay with headings or a page with an index you can jump from one place to another within your page. Simply use the following two tags:

<a href='#target'>Put jump word here</a> - this word when clicked on will jump down to the section further down on the page.

<a name='target'>Put jump location here</a> The hyperlink would take you to this section on the same page.

The ecological features of the <a href='#moreton'>Moreton Bay</a> Wetlands …

The line will display as:

The ecological features of the Moreton Bay Wetlands …

Clicking on 'ecological features' will jump to the Moreton Bay features anchor point somewhere else on the page.

The 'return to top' links that are used on some pages are another example of anchors.

Notes:
  • The 'a' in the tag is an abbreviation for 'anchor' while 'href' stands for 'hypertext reference'.
  • To link to another site, as shown above, include the site's URL (uniform resource locator) in the href.
  • The link for an internal page located in the same folder as the current document would be <a href='wetlands.html'>.

Linking to pages within different folders in your website

A link to a internal page saved in a different folder could be:

  • <a href='../moreton/wetlands.html'>
    This can be read as: to find the linked file, go up one folder from the current folder then, inside that folder, find another folder called 'moreton'. Go into the Moreton folder and find an HTML document saved with the filename 'wetlands.html'. Display this file

  • ../../ would be an instruction to go up two levels of folder.

  • moreton/habitats/ would be an instruction to go down two levels of folder

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