HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Without links, web pages would be dull and finding anything interesting on the Web would
be close to impossible. In many ways, the quality of your links can be as important as the
writing and design of your actual pages. Here's some friendly advice on creating and
using links.
Use Link Menus with Descriptive Text
As I've noted throughout this topic, using link menus is a great way of organizing your
content and the links on a page. If you organize your links into lists or other menu-like
structures, your visitors can scan their options for the page quickly and easily.
Just organizing your links into menus might not be enough, however. Make sure that
your descriptions aren't too short. For example, using menus of filenames or other mar-
ginally descriptive links in menus can be tempting (see Figure 18.11).
FIGURE 18.11
DON'T:
A poor
link menu.
Each link describes the actual page to which it points, but it doesn't describe the
content
of the page. How do visitors know what's on the other side of the link, and how can they
decide whether they're interested in it from the limited information you've given them?
Of these three links, only the last (
pesto-recipe.txt
) gives the visitors a hint about
what they'll see when they jump to that file.
A better plan is either to provide some extra text describing the content of the file, as
shown in Figure 18.12, or to avoid the filenames altogether. Just describe the contents of
the files in the menu with the appropriate text highlighted, as shown in Figure 18.13.
