# Adding links to other pages

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/adding-links-to-other-pages/293964>\
**Category:** web dev\
**Created:** [August 6, 2009, 9:45am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/adding-links-to-other-pages/293964 "2009-08-06T09:45:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![gilbertsavier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@gilbertsavier](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/gilbertsavier)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 9:45am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/adding-links-to-other-pages/293964/1 "2009-08-06T09:45:23Z")

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Hi,  
What makes the Web so effective is the ability to define links from one page to another, and to follow links at the click of a button. A single click can take you right across the world!

Links are defined with the \<a\> tag. Lets define a link to the page defined in the file “peter.html” in the same folder/directory as the HTML file you are editing:

This a link to \<a href=“peter.html”\>Peter’s page\</a\>.

The text between the \<a\> and the \</a\> is used as the caption for the link. It is common for the caption to be in blue underlined text.

If the file you are linking to is in a parent folder/directory, you need to put “…/” in front of it, for instance:

\<a href="…/mary.html"\>Mary’s page\</a\>

If the file you are linking to is in a subdirectory, you need to put the name of the subdirectory followed by a “/” in front of it, for instance:

\<a href=“friends/sue.html”\>Sue’s page\</a\>

The use of relative paths allows you to link to a file by walking up and down the tree of directories as needed, for instance:

\<a href="…/college/friends/john.html"\>John’s page\</a\>

Which first looks in the parent directory for another directory called “college”, and then at a subdirectory of that named “friends” for a file called “john.html”.

To link to a page on another Web site you need to give the full Web address (commonly called a URL), for instance to link to [www.w3.org](http://www.w3.org) you need to write:

This is a link to \<a href=“[http://www.w3.org/](http://www.w3.org/)”\>W3C\</a\>.

You can turn an image into a hypertext link, for example, the following allows you to click on the company logo to get to the home page:

\<a href="/"\>\<img src=“logo.gif” alt=“home page”\>\</a\>

This uses “/” to refer to the root of the directory tree, i.e. the home page.