Internal Links

Hyperlinks are the way we get around on the web, and these little rascals come in two flavors. There are internal links that link your own web pages and files together, and external links which link your pages to other web sites. This page covers Internal Links. If you wanted to learn how to use External Links, you're on the wrong page, kiddo.

When linking to pages within your own web site, since the browser is already in your directory you don't have to include the full URL (web page address) in your link. In fact, it's better if you don't.

If you include the full URL the browser goes back out on the Internet to find your entire address all over again. If you don't include the full url, it just searches on your site. Much faster that way. To create a link to one of your own pages simply use:

<a href="mypage.html">My Other Page</a>

That's how to do it if you keep all your HTML files in the same directory. If you keep them in different directories you still don't have to include a full URL. Suppose you have your index page in the main directory, and your poetry pages in a directory called poetry. Then you would link like this:

<a href="poetry/mypage.html">My Other Page</a>

What you've done is code in the correct server path in your link. If you need a better understanding of server paths, visit my tutorial on Relative vs. Absolute Links.

Definitions...

URL: Uniform Resource Locator

a href: a is for Anchor, href for Hypertext Reference