Tips and TricksWeb Design

Questions from the week – 2

Having been away for the best part of last week and the weekend I came back to a rather full inbox. Some of the questions sent to me will make excellent tutorials so I won’t answer them here this week. Here is a selection of the rest of the queries e-mailed to me.

How can I change the width of my iWeb site to change with the width of the user’s screen resolution?

This is something you can’t do in iWeb. Having a ‘fluid’ layout is popular in modern web design as it means you don’t have to cater for just one width of monitor (usually the smallest ie 800×600) and is achieved by setting the width of the content container to 100% within the CSS.

Of course you then have to take into account all of the other elements in the CSS, something we just cannot achieve within iWeb.

The safest option is to design your web-site to a width you think your target audience will use the most. One of the more common widths is around 900px rather than the default 700px set in iWeb.

How can I add a blogroll to my iWeb blog?

Adding a blogroll to your iWeb blog can be a good way of getting visitors to your site. Quite simply a blogroll is a list of sites, normally displayed in your side-bar that you like to visit and think your blog’s visitors will find useful. With any luck the sites you link to will have their own blogroll and link back to you.

To create a blogroll all you need to do is create a text-box in iWeb, and add a list of your favorite sites to it; apply hyperlinks to the relevant site names and that’s it. Where possible you should try and keep it all in the same text-box so that if you want to add it to more than one page you just have to copy the whole box rather than individual links.

All my hyperlinks open in the same window, how can I get them to open in a new window when a user clicks them?

Everytime you create a hyperlink in iWeb it creates the code for you that links to the relevant page/file/e-mail address that you specified in Inspector. Unfortunately the default is set so that any links to other pages or sites open in the same window. Web designers, as a rule, do this with thier sites. It is considered better web design etiquette however if you do want to have your links open in a new window here’s a little how-to:

Create your site and publish it to a folder. Open the page with the hyperlink on within an HTML editor of your choice (I use TextWrangler) and search for the following bit of code:

<a href="

This will then take you to the first hyperlink on the page (obviously if you have more than one on your page you will have to find the right one).

The full link should look somethng like this:

<a href="URL GOES IN HERE">Link Text Goes Here</a>

To get the link to open in a new window you need to add a bit of code after the second quotation mark so that the code looks like this:

<a href="URL GOES IN HERE" target="_blank">Link Text Goes Here</a>

Notice the addition of the target=”_blank” element? That’s the bit that makes the hyperlink open in a new page.

Now just save your page/site and publish to your web-space.

Remember to keep your questions coming, leave a comment or send me an e-mail via the Contacts page.

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5 Comments

  1. […] Visit link: iWeb Questions of the week – part 2 | All About iWeb […]

  2. Go the last tip that you gave, there is a much simpler (in my opinion) solution. What I do is a set it to link to an external page, enter the link to my page, and check off open link in new window. This way, you don’t need to edit the code which is especially helpful for those who publish with iWeb’s built-in FTP client. Great site, great tutorials, and great tips! Keep it up!

    1. iMaster,
      Thanks for the comment. You are indeed right but I answered that question for someone who wanted to edit a bit of code they had inserted through a HTML Snippet. Sorry for the confusion.

      Tim

  3. iMaster and All About iWeb,
    I think I asked the last question, so I want to explain why I did it. As there is little room for a blogroll in my web page, I am doing a drop down blogroll (learned how to do a drop down menu in another tutorial from this great page). I want to open the blogroll pages in another windows.
    Thank you very much for the answers

  4. Is there a way to have the hyperlinked image open up to a new window? I did the address drag from Safari into my iWeb image to put the hyperlink there, but it opens up on my same page. Thanks for you help!

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