FrontPage Express - Inserting hyperlinks 2
Managing links
Value added
How long is a Web page?
Other Hyperlink Information
Managing links
Adding a simple list of links to a page is easy. An effective way of managing the links is to use a bullet list, for example;
You can also embed links in a paragraph of text, for instance;
The mean is a measure of central tendency in a distribution, and the standard deviation acts as a measure of the dispersion. If the distribution is Normal, then 99.8% of results lie within a range of three standard deviations either side of the mean.
This is 'classical' hypertext. Each new word or concept is hyperlinked to a page which has some more information on that concept or word, and these pages in turn contain more references to information. This style of linking raises a number of issues:
- the hyperlinked words stand out and tend to attract attention, which interferes with the readability of the text
- the words linked require careful selection
- the number of links per paragraph needs to be monitored, one or two links per paragraph being regarded as good practice.
Older academic Web pages tend to use this embedded hyperlinking style, as do a number of CD-ROM based encyclopaedia including MS Encarta. Online examples of this style include;
- A page about Galileo's telescopes
-
A biography of Charles Messier
Value added
Have you ever had the experience of searching for a Web page about a topic, and ending up in a 'hall of mirrors' consisting of Web pages with a list of links to other Web pages with lists of links leading to other Web pages... with no useful content?
One way out of this list of links to pages of lists of links bind is to add some value to your links list. One way of doing this is to use the definition list paragraph style. The defined item is the name of the link, and you use the definition part of the link to write a few sentences about the content of the remote page. A good example of this style is the Galileo Project main page.
To use the definition list style in MS Front Page, just
- select the Defined Term style from the Change Style list
- type your Web page title
- highlight the Web page title
- click the Create or Edit Hyperlink toolbar button
- type in or copy the URL of the Web page, and click OK
- press Enter to move down one line and enter the definition style
- type a sentence or two describing the site
- press Enter to type another Defined Term, or press Enter twice to revert to Normal paragraph style.
Below is an example of my suggested Value Added Links list format applied to the example sites in the last section;
- Rice University Galileo Project
- This ambitious classical hypertext explores the life and discoveries of Galileo Galilei. Included is a wealth of information on Galileo's science, his theology and the other personalities around at the time. The site is worth a visit just for Richard Westfall's searchable database of scientists of the period.
- Charles Messier page
-
Helmut Fromert's page about the life and observations of Charles Messier is heavily hyperlinked to other material about seventeenth and eighteenth century astronomy, as well as up to date information on the Messier Catalogue objects.
How long is a Web page?
How long is a piece of string?
In the early days of Web pages, the prevailing wisdom was that pages should be one screen long. This lead to very large numbers of pages, each containing a frustratingly small amount of information all held together by a confusing structure.
Other pages consisted of whole books, filling 50 or 60 sides of A4 when printed out. Pages like this take ages to load, and are wasteful of bandwidth if you just want to check the quote in the second to last paragraph!
Current 'information giving' Web sites are organised so that each page in the site contains a coherent topic - the page could stand alone. Some pages may be more than one screen long, others can be quite short. Many pages (like these unit notes) use a contents list at the top of the page which links to sections within the page. In this way, the user can move around the page without using the scroll bar too much, and the page can be longer than the screen.
Other Hyperlink Information
As with images you can also type in a relative filename, so that the link refers to pages relative to the position of the page the link is on. If you simply enter the name of a file without any folder information then the link will try and load the page of that filename from the same folder as the one the page with the link is loaded from.
There are two other tabs on this dialog box and they allow you to create a link easily to pages that are already open in FrontPage Express and also to pages which haven't been created yet, but which you are going to create.
Lastly, it's worth noting that you can turn images into links as well as text. This is done by either selecting the image in the page and then clicking on the anchor button and setting the destination as you would with a normal text link, or by using the Image Properties dialog. In that dialog box on the General tab, there is a Default Hyperlink/Location text box. Into that you can type the destination you want the image link to refer to. You can type in the destination or choose it using the Browse button.
You can also set a destination frameset as you could in the anchor dialog box. This is done by for example if you click on Image Properties dialog (above) the URL is fpe images.htm#the the first section
fpe images = The title of the page
htm = The hyperlink code
# = The code to point to a particular placing on a page (A bookmark)
the = The text I chose to, associate the path to.
