Hyperlink With the Best of Them

So, if you blog, have your own web page, or even write e-mails then you're probably going to have to create a hyperlink at some point. You've probably noticed that if you paste a web address into an e-mail the link will turn blue and be underlined to indicate that it's a hyperlink. Since most people know how to create a hyperlink in this manner, I won't spent much time on it. However, one of my fellow bloggers asked me how you create a hyperlink without showing the actual web address.

Often times, a web page will have a link like this that doesn't say the url that it will take you to, but is still a hyperlink. This is kind of a neat trick, and it turns out that this is a fairly simple thing to accomplish once you've done it once or twice. Let's talk about how to do this in your blog.

1) Highlight the word(s) that you want to make into a hyperlink and click on the hyperlink button - in the shot below, I've outlined it in blue. It looks like a world with a chain link superimposed over it.


2) A box should pop up and ask you to enter the web address that you want to link to


Note: If you forgot to highlight the word that you want to be a hyperlink, in step 1, then you'll get this message instead.



3) Enter the web address (you can copy and paste) into the box and hit enter. The word(s) that you highlighted should now be blue (or purple if you've visited the site on the computer that you're currently using).


One more interesing point, you can make a picture the hyperlink. This way, I can click on the picture and it will take me to whatever site you want it to. To accomplish this, simply click on a picture in step 1 instead of highlighting a word or words. Just in case any of you are interested in html, I'll quickly outline how this can be changed on any web page that you may be authoring. I have underlined the html for a hyperlink like the one that we have just created in this screenshot:

"

Note: I had to remove all of the <> around the html tags so that they would show up on the page, so don't be confused by that.

a href="http://www.google.com/" this /a" is the html code that tells the web page that this is a link. The first part "a href="http://www.google.com/" tells the webpage that this is a hyperlink and specifies the web address that the browser should go to. The "/a" tells the web page that this is the end of the hyperlink, but the important part is what is between the opening and closing of the tag. ">this<" tells the web page what to show as the object of the hyperlink. So, if I changed the tag to "a href="http://www.google.com/" stupid link /a," then instead of showing "this" in blue on the web page, the words "stupid link" would show in blue as the hyperlink. This same trick can be used to make pictures into hyperlinks, if you know the tag to use to insert a picture, but that's beyond the scope of this post.