Open Link in a New Tab

When I am reading or browsing through a website and find an interesting link that would take me to another website, I really appreciate it when clicking on that link opens up the other site in a new tab in my browser. I like having where I started from still visible and easily found again after perusing the new link. Yes, you can always use the back arrow, but if you find an interesting link on that second page and click on it too, getting back to where you started is more difficult if each link just opens up on top of the old one in the same tab. Usually the links I click on are related to where I started from so being able to click back and forth between the tabs in any order I wish makes it much easier to cross reference each page of information.

I also want other people that land on my pages to be able to easily find their way back to my page if they click on a link that I have included. Therefore I add a small bit of html code that makes links to other sites in my blog articles, etc. open up in a new tab. You can check out this behavior be looking at and clicking on the links in my recent “Thanks for the Treasuries” blog post. While I hope readers of this post will check out my shops, an enlarged image of my items and the other shops that I feature, I also want them to easily find their way back to my blog post when they have finished checking out the other links. That is why I add the bit of html that makes links open up in a new tab. (Sometimes when you are adding links to a blog or website, a particular widget or module will be hardwired so that you cannot add this bit of code. However when you can access the html, here is what you do to make your link open in a new tab.)

The html circled in purple above, not including the bit circled in turquoise, is the html generated by most sites when you add a link. This bit of code will cause the link to open up in the same tab “on top of” where someone was when they clicked on the link. If you add the bit of code in turquoise ( target=”blank”) to this html, your link will open in a new tab. The image below shows a portion of the screen shot that I took when clicking on the word (link) “EDCCollective” in the above referenced post. The tab circled in turquoise was added when I clicked on the link and the tab for the original blog post, circled in pink, is still visible making navigation back to the blog easy by clicking on it.

(Each screen shot opens up larger in another tab when clicked on.)

So make it easy for me and your other visitors to get back to your page after clicking on links on your site by making sure they open in a new tab. It’s a snap.