Welcome back to Dreamweaver Beginning. This is John Widell and we are at Lesson 03C continuing on building our first site example. This is where we left off. And I am going to come back to my index file and I am going to create an external link.
I am going to come up here to my nav bar. Actually I am going to stick it right below. So I am not going to do it to the nav bar for every page. So just as an example, I am going to stick it below the—this is the home page text.
I’m going to hit Enter, Return. And I am just going to type Adobe.com. I am going to highlight that. And in my Properties Inspector, click to place my insertion cursor in the link parameter and I am going to type http://www.adobe.com. Save my file. Test it.
And for whatever reason, it didn’t take. So let’s do it again. http://www.adobe.com. Save my file. Okay. So it shows my link, mouse over it. This area down here below your—at the bottom of your browser window, this is your status area.
I want you to look at this area when my mouse is over this. The mouse is over it. Down here at the bottom, it actually tells me what that link is. When I come up here, it shows me the link that I am headed to which is a local document within my root folder.
So this is an external URL or an external link. It’s going to be leaving my website and going to another domain. When I click on this, if you’re connected to the internet, it will actually carry you to that domain. And that is how we link to external files.
But notice that now, if I look here. The browser has redirected. That means it’s changed it’s content from my site and it’s gone to Adobe’s site. Well, a lot of times when we’re creating external links, we don’t want to have our site replaced by the new content. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.
In Dreamweaver—and I am back in Dreamweaver within my index file, highlight here in my Properties Inspector, this is the link tab. This is specifying where the browser should go. Immediately underneath that is the target. And this is a dropdown and it gives us four choices.
These last three are really for more working with frame sets. I’m going to choose blank. And blank is a special word for actually opening that Adobe.com website in a new window; also known as a pop-up window. And let’s see what happens.
So I mouse over it, click. And in this case—because I am using Firefox, it’s opened this in a new tab. Okay. So, it leaves my website available for the user but it provides the new content in a new tab depending on your browser and the way that you’ve set up your browser preferences, it could actually open up a new window. That way when they close, this one doesn’t or do they go back to. They go back to my website. It’s actually not to take it back but by them closing that tab, this becomes the next active tab.
So it’s a way to actually give visitors to your website to make a brief foray into another domain; another website without leaving your website because in the business model of the web, it’s all about keeping people on your site; interacting with your information.
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