HTML, XHTML & CSS

Chapter 3: Proper Planning Prevents Poor Page Performance
Planning outside links
The Web wouldn’t be the Web without hyperlinks. After all, hyperlinks connect
your site to the rest of the Web and turn a collection of pages into a
cohesive site. But overusing or misusing links detracts from a site — and may
even cost you some business.
Choose off-site links wisely
Internal linking is a walk in the park compared to external linking; after all,
when you link to pages on your own site, all such pages are under your control.
You know what’s on them today, whether they will exist tomorrow, and
what will be on them. When you link to resources on someone else’s site,
however, all bets are off:
✓ You don’t maintain the pages.
✓ You can’t modify the page’s content.
✓ You certainly don’t know whether the pages will disappear.
Neither will your visitors — until they slam into a 404 File or Directory
Not Found message (the usual sign of a broken link that now goes
nowhere). The text in 404 messages varies depending on the server that
hosts the Web site with the broken link.
Links to other sites are more useful when they’re stable and have less chance
of breaking. We recommend these guidelines:
✓ Link to a section of a site, not to a specific page. Pages come and go,
but general organization lasts longer.
✓ Link to corporate Web sites. Corporate sites have more staying power
than sites maintained by an individual.
✓ Don’t link directly to media files, such as PDFs and images. If you want
to link to resources on another Web site, link to the page that links to
those resources instead of the actual media files. Sites often update
resources or give them new names. The page that links to the resource,
however, is almost always certain to be updated to reflect new names.
Therefore the resource page is a safer linking bet.
Linking to other sites implies your support or endorsement of those sites.
When visitors follow links from your site to other sites, they assume you
approve of that new site. That implied approval makes a couple of guidelines
necessary:
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