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Creating Internal Links
(that is, Linking Items Within the Same Page)



At the top of your final report, under its title, a table of contents must list your report's section titles and subtitles. In order to enhance the navigability of your online report, you are required to link each of the listed items in your table of contents to its section.  Here are step-by-step directions for doing so.

To create a link from one place to another within the same page, you first need to create a "target," then create a link that points to the target.

After opening your rough draft for editing in Netscape Composer:

1. Put the cursor at the beginning of a line where you want to create a target. For instance, you'll probably start with the line in your report that says Introduction (not the line in your table of contents that says Introduction); the following steps will create an internal link from the word "Introduction" in your table of contents to the beginning of this section of the report.

2. Open the Insert menu and choose Target.

3. Type a name for the target in the edit box (the first word of each section title works just fine).

4. Click OK. A Target image (visible only in the Composer window) appears in your document to mark the target's location.

5. Highlight the line in your table of contents that you want to link to the target.

6. Hit the Link button, then click once on the name of the target you just created (it will appear in the biggest box within the pop-up window), then press OK.

7. Once you’ve made links from the title of each section and subsection in the table of contents to its section in the report, hit the X at the upper right of Composer, give this version a new name (such as "reportfinaldraft"), and save this new version of your report on your disc. Then use ws_ftp to send it to your account. After typing in the new URL in Netscape, you’ll be able to check whether your new internal links work.

8. If you want to get even more fancy, you can link each section of the report BACK to the beginning of the report in the same way; most web writers do this by writing the word "top" or "back to the top" at the beginning of each section, then linking it back to the beginning of the page. To do this, make a target at the very beginning of the document, or at the beginning of the table of contents, named top; then use this name for the linked word "top" that you wrote at the beginning or end of each section within the report.

9. NOTE: one potential screw-up while using Composer—make sure that in the pop-up window for entering link names, each internal link’s name has a # in it.

10. NOTE ALSO, another, potentially bigger screw-up that has caused some students big headaches: after you've added internal links to your final report, be careful NOT to use the internal links while editing your report in Composer.  You might end up accidentally saving a version of your report that has a # in its name, rather than its actual name; other problems can also occur. The general rule here: do not click on the internal links while you are in Composer; only check to see if they work on the Internet, after you have transferred a version of your final report to your account.

11. Questions? Problems? Ask me (or someone next to you who seems to know what they’re doing).