How Do I Find a Link on a Page?

In this lesson, we are going to look at how to find hyperlinks on a web page and use them to go to other web pages.

Hyperlinks are also called "links." (Think of the movie Star wars with hyperspace, going from one place to another through a hyperspace link. This is the same way the Internet or World Wide Web works.)

In the early days of the World Wide Web (WWW), hyperlinks were really easy to identify but not really that nice to look at. Usually, linked text was of a different color and underlined. If it was a picture that was linked, it would have an ugly border around it.

Now, we are much more sophisticated and most websites use a visual representation of their entire site that appears on the first page just like the UCF Web page shown here. We can see that we have many jump off points into the different parts of the UCF Web site. We can quickly figure out where we want to go.

If we want to go the library, we move our pointer over the library and we can see that instead of an arrow, we now have a pointing hand. We click at that point and go to another web page within the web site. Here is an example of "different color text" that is underlined, which is a hypertext link. Notice the difference between the regular text (no pointing hand, no link) and the underlined, colored text (pointing hand, linked text).

Notice that after you have first gone to a link, the text changes colors. The text was a lighter color and now it is a darker color. Take a look again, click on the link using the back button to go back to the page where we just were. Now the link will still work but it is a different color. It is a nice way to see where you have been and where you haven't been because you can get lost easily on the WWW. Click the back button to go back to the UCF Web page and we will use another example.

If a web page has not been put together that well, it a may not be that easy to see what is a link and what is not a link. If you are not sure, use your mouse to point at different sections on the screen. In this case, our pointer is still an arrow. It can move around the screen. I know that even if it is not clear to the eye, I know that this is a link because of the arrow turning into a hand. I can identify all of the links on this screen just by moving the pointer around the page.

Another tip is to look at the bottom left hand corner of the screen when you are pointing at a link. You will see the URL (uniform resource locator), the Internet address you will go to when you click the link. Look at the bottom of the screen and see how the URL changes.

In this example, we have seen how to identify and selectively use links to successively navigate within a website. But what if you want to go somewhere different that is not in the website that you are looking at? That's for next time!