To follow up the long list of things I think everyone should have on their webcomic sites, I’m now going to talk about one way to organize all that information on a single page.  After making webpages for so many different sites, something I realize now is that website visitors don’t want to be directed to page after page after page, because they lose track of where they came from.  They get “lost” in all the information, basically.  Instead, they would rather all the information be available on one page, organized, and easy to read. If, on that page, they realize they want more information on a single topic, then they want to click a link to an “expanded” description.

So how do you do this? No one wants to read down a huge, scrolling wall of text. No one wants to have to scan through that text to find the ONE piece of information they want.  This is where link achors come in handy.

Link anchors are regular links that take you a place on the same webpage.  You can see it in action on my own about page.  When you click any of the links in the sub-navigation, you are taken to the paragraph in question.  These are extremely convenient when used properly, but like all “tricks” should be used in moderation.  You do NOT need to use link anchors on the majority of pages you make unless you are doing something wrong: writing TOO much, basically.  Brevity is a virtue on the internet (and just about everywhere, for that matter), practice it.

To code a link anchor, you do the following and place it at the destination of where you want to take the reader (anchor goes at destination, simple, yes?):

<a id=”LINK-NAME”></a>

There is nothing inside of that link, and there is no “href.”  It is an anchor. You CAN put text inside of that, but it defeats the purpose of even having an anchor.

To link TO the anchor, you code the following (no spaces in the link name, only underscores and hyphens!):

<a href=”#LINK-NAME”>Text</a>

For example, I will make a link inside of this article.  This link…

…

…will take you here.  This comes in handy when you want direct readers to a specific place, obviously. For example, on your cast page. If you go a recent website I built, the character thumbnails on the front page link to separate character profiles on the cast page.

The second trick is link titles. Last time I went over link titles it was on the subject of SEO. Now it’s about putting more information in a page without actually PUTTING it in there.  Again, I will direct you to a live example: my cast page.  Please hover over the text that is highlighted in the character profiles. See the “title” that comes up?  The information is available if people want it, but it is not there to take up more space unnecessarily.

This is coded with the following:

<a title=”descriptive text here”>Visible Text Here</a>

And in action:

Visible Text Here

This text is not clickable. It doesn’t take the visitor away from the page The extra information only appears when the cursor is hovered over it. BUT! This extra text is visible to search engines. SEO FTW!

Next Up: A personal success story in Webcomic SEO.