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Using Bookmarks for Site Navigation
17th October 2006
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Navigation within a large web page can be accomplished by specifying bookmarks on the page. These are locations to which you can link. Some HTML editors have tools that make it simple to set a bookmark.
Let’s say you have a large page and down in the middle of the page, you have a heading called “Infopreneur”. You want to allow your reader to link directly it. You can do so with some simple HTML code shown in the following example.
To set the title “Infopreneur” as a bookmark with HTML:
Authors note: The xmp and /xmp tags tell the browser to accept what it between the tags as text and do not execute it as HTML.
The HTML “< a name” identifies this as an anchor for a link. This is the same as the link target. The “Bookmark name” is preceded by the “#”. The word “Infopreneur” is what actually shows on the web page. This is very simple to do if you want to insert a bookmark into your page using HTML.
When you do a link to “#Bookmark name”, the browser will shift the page so the heading “Infopreneur” is at the top of the monitor.
Bookmarks are also useful for creating links in a table of contents so the reader can link directly to the topic from the table of contents entry without having to scroll down to find the topic.
One last tip on bookmarks… You can link to another web page and go directly to the bookmarked topic without having to go to the top of the page and make the reader scroll down to the topic. Here is a link to Volume 1 Issue 18 of Boomer eZine. It specifically links to the topic, “Author’s Comments” which is set up as the anchor for the link:
http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I18_081106.htm#Author's[Note1]Comments.
[Note 1] replaces three characters that are a percent sign (%) and the number 20. This indicates a space in computer code. If I try to express this as it actually appears on a web page, the reader only sees a space in this article.
The “[Note1]” indicates a space. The reason for this is URL’s cannot have spaces in them so the browser replaces the space with percent sign 20 to prevent an invalid link. The browser knows that when it gets to the page, it is looking for the bookmark, “Author’s Comments”, with a space between the words.
Bookmarks are great tools to use to assist your readers in navigating your site. This makes for happy readers and encourages them to stay on your site longer seeking more information.
Become a bookmark expert and use them well.
Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.
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