Creating Research-Based Web Sites with Netscape Composer

Module 3 - Building a Site with Netscape Composer

Fixing Your Links

Anyone who has used technology successfully has undoubtedly encountered bumps in the road along the way.  This is not uncommon.  And if you continue to use technology, there will be more bumps to come.  The trick is finding the solutions to the problems and moving forward.

In the Lab Exercise from Module 3, you were shown a way to create your navigation system and links to the other pages in your site.  Once you created this navigation system we copied it to all the other pages in our site – this shortcut was to allow us to create a navigation system that was consistent from page to page in a short amount of time.  Unfortunately, this copy and paste method has not proven to be 100% reliable for everyone – some folks that followed the steps perfectly still had some links that did not work properly.  Certainly this is one of those bumps in the road.  But fear not - there are solutions to these problems and this section is provided to help you fix any problem links you may have. 

If you want to use the copy and paste method to create your navigation in the future, you may do so, but be sure to check and fix any links that are not created properly by following the steps outlined below.

You are also strongly urged to contact Dr. McClurken or Jerry Slezak to get assistance with this process if you need it.  Help and resources are available to help you overcome linking problems, but you are responsible for making use of them.

 

Using Composer to Fix Broken Hyperlinks

Broken links are fairly easy to fix in Composer – but you need to do a bit of checking to find the broken links first. 

Here are some basic steps to follow in checking and repairing your broken hyperlinks:

1. Look closely at your links to see where they are pointing:

    • Open your HTML page in Netscape Composer

    • If you take the cursor and hover over the links, a small yellow box will appear that contains information as to what file that particular link is pointing to.


2. By examining the links that show up in the yellow box, we can determine if they are absolute links or relative links.  In the image above, this is the address that appears in the yellow box:

index.html

This link is a “relative link” – this link is pointing to the file in our web site folder for the file called index.html.  These are the kind of links we want to see.

Here is an example of a different kind of link that you may see:



if you see a link like this in the yellow box:

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Owner/Desktop/proposal/vision.html

it is a “absolute link.”  This is not the kind of link we want to use to connect our pages together.  The key to look for is that the link is pointing to the C: drive – this is the local hard drive on your computer.  This link will work on YOUR computer only, but not on the web, it will give you an error message.

3. To fix an absolute link:

    • Open the page that has links to fix in Composer.

    • Hover over the links to find the one(s) that need to be modified

    • Double click on a link that needs to be modified.  This opens the Link Properties Dialog box.

 

    • Click the Choose File button, and pick the correct file from your web site folder.

 

4. Other links that need to be repaired can also be fixed by repeating these steps.

 

Site created and maintained by Jeffrey McClurken ( jmcclurk@umw.edu) | Department of History and American Studies
 and Jerry Slezak ( jslezak@umw.edu) | Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies
©2005 University of Mary Washington, 1301 College Ave, Fredericksburg, VA. 22407
Page updated 7/29/05