The World Wide Web would be rather short on information if we couldn’t link to other pages from time-to-time. Or, maybe all the pages would be a half-mile long if all the information had to be featured on only one page.
Linking to other pages is not hard to do, or very complicated. In this short paper I’ll show you how to link to other pages as well as to points on the same page. For example, a link that brings the viewer back to the top of the page.
There are two kinds of links, one type is called “Absolute” and the other is called “Relative.” Let’s start with the “Absolute” link first.
Let's say you wish to link to a very popular search engine on the Web called “Google.com”. You must provide an “absolute address” to this site if you expect your visitors to be able to link to the site. This is the code you must type to do this:
< A HREF="http://google.com" >Go To Google Search Engine < /A >
The code is presented inside an “anchor” tag called A HREF, the A stands for “anchor,” and the HREF stands for “hypertext-reference.” Because this is an “absolute Web site address,” you have to add the “Internet Protocol” as well. The http:// stands for “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol,” it’s what makes Web pages link to one another.
The text that comes after the > Go To Google Search Engine is the text that will become a blue hypertext link. It's that last bit of code that finishes up the process, . Be sure to add the forward leaning slash [/] in front of the A, this is a closing tag, if you don't use the slash, every bit of text that follows on the page will be underlined and be a hyperlink to google.com as well! Absolute links are of great use to Web page designers when linking to other sites on the Web, but they are not to be used to link to your own pages that are either on your floppy disk or a Web host. To link to your very own pages, you will use a much simpler “Relative” link.
“Relative” links do not use the Internet protocol as shown above, therefore, it's even simpler to use. Let’s say you are on your home page called “index.html” and you wish to have your viewers move on the “page2.html,” you would type the code shown below:
< A HREF="page2.html" >Go to Page 2 < /A >, see I told you it would be simple! And, once on page two of your site, it would be very nice of you to provide a hyperlink back to the home page. The code on your second page would look like this:
< A HREF="index.html" >Home Page < /A >, now you can click links on both pages and move back and forth between the Web pages.
Once you start building more Web pages, you might wish to have a series of links on the home page that allows your visitor to move throughout the Web site a bit easier. Let’s take a look at an idea that will work, but be advised there are many ways to move around a Web site, this is just one of the many ways. You could build a single line of hypertext links to; let’s say five different pages on your Web site in the following way. Let’s also assume that your pages are simply named, such as page2.html, page3.html, page4.html, etc. On the next page you’ll see a paragraph of hypertext that you could try for yourself.
Page updated 06/20/2025