Lesson 3 - Links

There are two ways to insert a link. The Markdown way is easier, but the HTML route will afford you more control.

Markdown

For a Markdown-style link, you'll wrap your link text in square brackets, followed immediately by the link itself in parentheses, like so:

This is a link to Lee's website.

It's always necessary to include https:// at the start of a link, because if you don't, your browser will think it is a link to somewhere within your site.

Link to other pages

By not writing https:// we can link directly to other pages on the site:

This links directly to the "About" page.

It's important to include that leading slash, because that tells the browser that the link is the page /about and not /gallery/lesson-3-links/about.

HTML

You might have noticed if you clicked on the link to my website that it opened in the same tab, not a new tab. Sometimes this isn't what you want. In that case, you can use some extra syntax.

This is a link to Lee's website that will open in a new tab.

The target="_blank" bit is what makes it open in a new tab. The curly braces mean "add this HTML attribute to this Markdown content".

Descriptive link text

It's important to make sure that your link text actually describes the link if read as a standalone item. This adds to accessibility as well as SEO. Because of this, you'll want to avoid links that say things like "Read more" or "More info."