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Setting up your own links page
External LinksWe've discussed previously the importance of using links, particularly those coming and going to sites which have a similar theme to your own. Well now I'm going to show you how to add links to a webpage. Please take note that this page is aimed at novice web designers and those who maybe havent yet plucked up the courage to start editing their own pages, if you already make changes to your own site, this information will probably be too basic for you.
Make a Table
Ok, the first thing we need to make is a small table to contain the links and keep a uniform appearance to our page. Dont worry, I'm gonna make the table for you, all you'll have to do is copy the code from this page to your own. We'll use a simple Table here for demonstration purposes but you can have any size Table you want so long as it fits on your page. Our Table will consist of 2 columns and 3 rows, the top row containing the text 'links of interest' will span both columns and will serve as a type of heading for the entire Table. In its bare form, it will look something like the following. I've added some text just to give you an idea of the finished article.
| Links of Interest |
| The Nail Geek | The Nail Directory |
| Natural Nails By Fiona | Liberty Nail Design |
The code for the above Table is shown below and I will explain each part of it, it might look scary but trust me, it's very simple.
<table width="80%" border="1"><tr><td colspan=2 align="center">Links of Interest<td><tr>
<tr><td align="center">The Nail Geek<td><td align="center">The Nail Directory<td><tr>
<tr><td align="center">Natural Nails<td><td align="center">Liberty Nail Design<td><tr>
<table>
Into the Cell
The cell is the only part of the Table code that you have to be able to recognize at this early stage. This is the place where you will be adding a link to the Table. The cell is easily recognized (I've coloured the code 'Red' in the cell containing the Nail Geek text above), just look for the section of code that begins like this <td align="center">, then just simply add your link text immediately after the closing bracket of the tag and before the opening bracket of the cell end tag, so that you now have something similar to this <td align="center">"link text here"<td>
Change the text to a proper linkThe eagle eyed among you may have noticed that the text in the Table above doesnt actually link out to anyone. That's because we havent added the code for the link, again it's just a small bit of code. To add the code to change the text for the Nail Geek into a real link, all we need to type is
<a href="http://www.thenailgeek.com" "target="_blank">The Nail Geek</a>
All that's left to do now is enter the code into our Table cell as explained above.
Your Table cell should now look like this
<td align="center"><a href="http://www.thenailgeek.com" "target="_blank">The Nail Geek</a><td>
The updated Table will now look like this. Please take note that you always use the http:// before writing the www. Repeat this procedure for each additional link.
| Links of Interest |
| The Nail Geek | The Nail Directory |
| Natural Nails By Fiona | Liberty Nail Design |
You can change the look of the Table as you learn a little more. For example if you want a Table without a border, simply change the border setting to "0" (that's zero) in the original table code. So then, with all the link code added and the border changed to "0", our new Table looks like this.
The Code that you need for your own page
To place a table on your own webpage, you'll need to open your webpage and view the page source, you can do this using a text editor such as 'notepad', do NOT use any word processor type programmes as they are not suitable and will not work. Now click on 'select all' in the box below to copy the necessary code and then paste it into your own page at the location that you've previously picked out. The code will place a table on your page, the table will be 90% of the width of your page. It will have 5 rows with the top row given over to the heading as we saw earlier. The remaining 4 rows have space for 12 links which should be plenty to get you started. If you are not going to use a table cell immediately and you need to take out the Insert Link Here text, just delete the text and replace it with until such time as you are ready to add a link to that cell.
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