Linking and navigation overview

Once you've established a local site in which to store your Web site documents, and created HTML pages, you'll want to create connections from your documents to other documents or file types. To see how to set up a local site, see Creating a local site. Using Dreamweaver, there are several ways to set up hypertext links to documents, images, multimedia files, or downloadable programs. You can establish links to any text or image anywhere within a document, including text or images located in a heading, list, table, layer, or frame. With Dreamweaver you can easily create the following types of links from text and graphic images:

• Internal links, linking documents in the same Web site.
• External links, linking to documents outside of a local Web site.
• E-mail links that open an e-mail form.
• Links to named anchors that allow the visitor to jump to a particular area on the same Web page or to one on a different page.

About document locations and paths

Understanding the file path between the document you're linking from and the document you're linking to is essential to creating links. Each Web page has a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). However, when you create a local link (a link from one document to another on the same site), you generally don't specify the entire URL of the document you're linking to; instead, you specify a relative path from the current document or from the site's root folder. The following are the three types of document paths: