Creating Your Own Custom Website, Step 3

If you've read my first two articles on this subject and put in a little time and effort to practice the techniques I outlined, you should be ready to move on to the next step.

Remember that the primary purpose of having a custom website is to create a marketing tool that will build credibility in you and the products and service you sell. You will want to build links (called hyperlinks) to any affiliate pages related to those products and services, as well as provide links to additional related information contained in blogs (yours as well as other people's).

You do NOT, however, want to guide the visitor away from your website. In order to accomplish both purposes, you need to build links that will open up in a new browser window.

Using the "Compose" function in SeaMonkey, open a page from your Custom Website folder, execute a "Save As" from the drop-down "File" menu in the upper left-hand corner, and name it Testpage. This will give you a webpage to play around with when you're trying out new things. Don't worry; your existing page will be preserved with the original title.

Now open a second browser window (or Tab if your using IE7), and find a webpage for which you want to build a link. Go back to your Testpage and highlight a word or phrase that you want to use as a hyperlink. Now, you can either:

1. right-click the "Link" button on the toolbar at the top of the page, or
2. place your pointer inside the highlighted word or phrase, left-click, then right-click "Create Link"

At this point, a dialog box will open with a space for a URL (internet address). Go back to the browser page with which you want to link, and copy and paste the URL into the SeaMonkey dialog box. If this sounds familiar, it's because we're using almost the same method used to build the nav bar.

However, there is one very important additional step. Don't click the "OK" button just yet. Instead, click on "Advanced Edit". This will open a second dialog box and bring you to a tab marked "HTML Attributes". In the "Attributes" section at the bottom, select "target", in the "Value" section type the word "blank" (without the quotation marks.) Now click "OK" in both dialog boxes, and you're done!

Remember that there are three very important rules when creating websites that will become part of the public domain...

1. Test
2. Test again
3. Test one more time

You want your visitors to gain a sense of confidence that you know what you're doing - and having a website with links that don't work as advertised will accomplish just the opposite. Even after you publish, it is a good idea to test your off page links periodically to ensure that the websites still exist, and are in the same place. The internet is a dynamic medium, and things change all the time.

The next lesson will revolve around building off page links using images. Most of the service and product providers you'll be dealing with provide scripts to do this, but knowing exactly where to place the code can be a little tricky. There is an easier way to do it, and I will give you details in Creating Your Own Custom Website, Step 4.