We’ll finish up our tour of the body tag with several posts featuring general notes about common content elements. I’ll be taking my time with these as getting this stuff right will go a long way towards getting the most out of your site.

Comfy?

On with it then.

Links <a>

The link is the engine of the web. The concept of Hypertext (the H in HTML) itself is expressed in the power of the link. Google is Google because of the power of links. There is no better place to start.

Basic usage

<a href="http://www.drunkenfist.com/"
        class="contact"
        title="my personal site"
        rel="me">DrunkenFist.com</a>

Write Good Link Text

For body copy you want to write link text that is descriptive of the link destination. generally this means a short phrase (5-10 words, depending on who you ask) that clearly describes the link. For that reason “click here” is generally not the greatest link text. For a live example and more on this topic take a look at link chapter of the the US Government’s Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines. It’s full of really interesting tips on handling links.

For the SEO-minded, the above advice has the added bonus of generally including keywords which flow link juice and context to the targeted page.
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The difference in speed between my day job and the after hours hacking I do is sometimes mind-boggling. My day job is a typical “day job”. Anything of note takes time to happen. I’m cool with that.

I’m also cool with what happens at home. Where I can get an idea, hit Google for some quick research and get on with the business of making it happen.

Case in point, I registered dfst.us yesterday- before I even googled “php based URL shortener”- and about 30 hours later (only about 2 of which was actual coding- tweaking the easy-to-use phurl script) I’m sitting here with my own personal URL shortening service.
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