All decent Dreamweaver training courses and online tutorials will show you how to create hyperlinks. HTML hyperlinks provide an essential interactivity allowing users to move from one place to another within a web site. Links can be attached to both text and images. To attach a link to text

1. Select your text.

2. Click on the folder icon next the Link box in the Property Inspector.

3. Find the file to which you want to link and double-click on it.

Any text you convert to a hyperlink will change appearance and become blue (with underline) or to the link colour specified with the command Modify – Page Properties. CSS styles can also be used to change the appearance of links and to exploit Internet Explorer’s Hover feature whereby the link colour can be changed when the mouse rolls over it. (See the section on using CSS styles in Unit 5: working with text.)

The Browse button (the folder icon) and point to file icons are especially useful ways of creating links since they minimise the risk of errors. However, if the file to which you want to create the link has not yet been be saved to disk, these methods cannot be used. To create a link manually:-

1. Select the text.

2. Type a URL in the Link box in the Property Inspector.

3. Press the Enter key.

There is an even more useful way of defining a link: using the point-to-file icon located next to the Link box in the Property Inspector (to the left of the folder icon).

1. Reposition the Files and Document windows as necessary until they are next to each other.

2. Select your text.

3. Drag the point to file icon into the Files panel directly onto the file to which you want to link.

You can also use an image file as a link.

1. Click once on the image to highlight it.

2. Click the Browse button (the folder icon) next the Link box in the Property Inspector.

3. Locate and then double-click the file to which you want to link.

Needless to say, the point-to-file and manual link creation techniques can also be used with images. Images which have been hyperlinked can normally be distinguished from other images by a border which appears around them in a colour which matches the link colour for that page. Dreamweaver suppresses this border by setting the border attribute of the IMG element to zero. If, for any reason, you wish to have a border around a linked graphic, in the Property inspector, change the zero to one or more pixels.

To learn more about Dreamweaver training courses, visit Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Dreamweaver training courses at their central London training centre.

Adobe Dreamweaver is a widely-used web development tool aimed at inexperienced and experienced users alike. It allows developers to work visually and behind the scenes, it uses standard web technologies such as HTML CSS and JavaScript. Web pages can be introduced into a Dreamweaver site at any time without the danger of the program modifying your code. In the same way, pages that you create in Dreamweaver can be taken out of the Dreamweaver environment and used elsewhere.

The program does not rely on its own unque solutions which will only work in the Dreamweaver environment. Although Dreamweaver is not necessarily the best environment for creating all types of website, it is not an environment which one easily outgrows. It can be used both for creating basic, static content consisting of client side pages as well as more sophisticated dynamic content including server side pages. In other words, it is suitable for developing the content found on the vast majority of websites. So, let’s examine this content in more detail.

Most web sites are hosted on web servers run by specialist hosting companies. A large website may have a dedicated server or even servers, whereas most typical websites will be sharing space on a server with other sites. Visitors to a website are sometimes called clients.

Clients gain access to the content on web servers using a variety of different operating systems and different browsers. They normally find this content either by clicking on links from search engines and other locations or by simply typing a URL into the address bar of their browser.

The content that clients access on websites can be divided into two main categories: client-side and server-side. The term client-side refers to web content which is compatible with the user’s browser, material which the browser software can actually open, display or execute (in the case of scripts).

The main element in client-side content is HTML, or as it’s known in its current incarnation, XHTML; a stricter and more consistent version of the original HTML specification. HTML is a fairly simple markup language which is used to describe the content of web pages for the benefit of the client’s browser. CSS and JavaScript are used in close conjunction with HTML.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is used for describing the layout and presentation of web content. JavaScript is an easy-to-learn scripting language which can be used to add interactivity to web pages. For example, when someone is filling out a form on a website and information entered into a field is inappropriate, JavaScript can be used to notify them that the content must be changed.

All modern web browsers are fully capable of understanding XHTML, CSS and JavaScript content. With the addition of extra software known as plug-ins, other technologies can be added to web pages. Two of the most popular are Flash and Adobe Acrobat PDF files. All of this content then is fully compatible with the client’s browser; hence the term client-side content.

The author is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses in London and throughout the UK.