HTML Tip

For those of you who maintain your own book’s website or blog, here’s a quick suggestion you can implement to keep readers on your website.


Whenever you link to another website from your website or blog, make sure it opens up in a new window in your browser. If you know basic html code, you can write it in like this:

<a target=_blank href="websitelinkurl">websitelinkurl</a>

instead of this:

<a target=_parent href="websitelinkurl">websitelinkurl</a>

In other words, “parent” opens the link in the same window and “blank” opens the link in a new window.

I always fear that when I post a link to a different website and it opens up in the same window, we might lose that viewer, and they won’t go back to our website. Of course they can use the “back” button, but every click they make poking around the new site takes them further away from our site. If they have two windows open, when they close the new window, ours is still accessible. If you have a webmaster who maintains your site, suggest this as well.