Link Windows: Should My Links Open Up In New Windows?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 8 of November , 2007 at 10:48 am

Should you set your links to open in a new window or have them open in the same browser window that your visitors have open? Do you know how to do it either way?

This is a question for serious webmasters. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. It really depends on your goals and what you want your links to do. As a general rule, I would make all my internal links - links that take site visitors from one page to another within my website - open in the same browser. To have every link open up a new browser window is very annoying for many people so you want to do that sparingly. That doesn’t mean you’ll never do it.

Some times when you might want to have a link open in a new browser window are:

• When you are sending visitors to a resource outside of your own website but you don’t want them to leave your website
• When you want to collect specific information from the visitor, you might want to open your survey or info-collection box in a pop up window initiated by a click
• When you have information on a product or service that should be accessed by clicking on a specific link but the page your visitors is on also has other information that you want them to continue reading or browsing
• When you have a site feature that will hold your visitor’s interest for awhile, such as a blog or a forum, and you think they might still be interested in viewing the information on the current page after they’ve had a chance to see what your other feature offers

As you can see, there are several good reasons why a new browser window might be in order, but for most links I would say it isn’t necessary. If you want a browser window to open in the same window, you generally don’t need any code to make that happen. It’s the default for most browsers. But if you want a new browser window to open up when a visitor clicks on a link, just add target=”new” to the a href tag between your brackets. That link will open in a new window.

Category: Internal Linking

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg

No comments yet.