Images are common components of any web page. They are also a great way to create a link to another page. By using a combination of anchor tags with an href attribute and image tags, we can create an image that works as a link between two pages. You can accomplish this by following the steps below:
- Create a div element. This will hold our image element, our anchor tag and anything else we might want to use to describe the link.
- Next, create an anchor tag. <a> tags have hypertext references (href’s) that point a link to another page. Set the href to whichever site or file you want your link to go to.
- In between the opening and closing <a> tag, let’s create an <img> tag. Remember that image tags are self-closing. Add an attribute called src that will point to the url or path to the image you are using for your link.
- Create something that will describe the image so the user knows it’s clickable. This could be a <caption> tags, a <div> tags, an <h2> element, a <p> tag – whatever you want it to be.
A working sample is in the code editor below. Definitely take some time to play around with it!
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Image Link</title>
<style>
div {
width: 500px;
display: flex;
flex-flow: column wrap;
}
img {
width: 100%;
}
caption {
width: 100%;
height: 50px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<a href="https://www.goldengate.org/" target="_blank" referrerpolicy="no-referrer">
<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1449034446853-66c86144b0ad?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=2100&q=80" alt="Golden Gate Bridge" refer/>
</a>
<caption>
An icon in the San Francisco skyline, the Golden Gate bridge shines in the twilight night sky. Click the image to learn more information about the Golden Gate bridge.
</caption>
</div>
</body>
</html>
One final note: It is tempting to put an <a> only around the caption – since that’s what the link is referring to. Users have come to expect that if they click on a picture, a new tab will open with the link destination (this is what the target=”_blank” syntax is doing). So, keep the <a> tag surrounding the link and leave the text to describe the picture – or put the <a> tag around both the text and <img>. Both ways are viable options.