Colorize Your Links

Colorize Your Links
By Brett McCarron, webmaster
The Blame Productions

Photo credit: (C) 2000 The Blame Productions If you use colored backgrounds -- especially in tables -- this secret will allow you to choose a contrasting color for your links.
The colored links you specify with this method can be a different color than the colors you specified in the LINK=, VLINK= and ALINK= settings in the BODY statement.
To illustrate this technique, let's pretend that a customer wants a link to always show as silver on the page. No matter if the customer has clicked it before, or even if the cursor is resting on the link, the link should always be displayed in silver. (The site in the example, EXPIRED_LINKS_R_US.COM, does not really exist, so you'll get a site not found error message if you click on it.)
The first example ignores the color tags we've placed outside the regular A HREF link tags. No matter what color you include in the font color statement, the code is ignored and the link will continue to display in the colors you've identified in the BODY statement for that page.

HTML code:
<font color="#c0c0c0"><a href="EXPIRED_LINKS_R_US.COM">Why didn't this work?</a></font>

Interpreted as:
Why didn't this work?

Example 1: Font color tags outside the link tags won't work (link shows up with regular page link colors).

Now look at the second example, where the color codes are inserted in between the link tags and the link title. Yep! Now the customer is happy because his link always shows in silver, the rest of the page links display in whatever color you've identified in the BODY statement, he gives you a big bonus payment, and you're happy because now you're reading this from a wireless PC sitting on the beach in Aruba. Ain't life grand?

HTML code:
<a href="EXPIRED_LINKS_R_US.COM"><font color="#c0c0c0">Cool! This worked the way I wanted!</font></a>

Interpreted as:
Cool! This worked the way I wanted!

Example 2: Font color tags inside the link tags lets you choose a special color for each link
(link now shows up in silver color).

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