Link rollovers

“What’s this madman on about now”, you may be
thinking? Having sex in the middle of a golf course?

Well, that would be more thrilling than my following
description, of how to change the appearance of your
HTML links to other pages/websites (when you roll
your mouse pointer over them). As some of you will
have seen, I’m constantly tinkering with this
blogsite, as I like trying out new things.

I’m a newbie to building websites and more so as
regards understanding HTML. With a lot of help from
one of my friends, I’ve had a go at building some
simple websites with Dreamweaver 4, but to change
this Blogger site, I’ve had to learn a bit of HTML.

Earlier this week, I added link rollovers to a couple
of websites, by reading up the subject on the internet
and by pasting in the correct code. I’ve noticed that
Dreamweaver MX can do this for you, but not the older
version of Dreamweaver that I have.

As you know, Blogger already has link rollovers on
its sites, but I wanted to remove the underlining
and change the colour scheme of the links. So I’ve
done that with this website, and I hope you like
the changes, albeit slight. By the way, I’ve made
the “visited” links the same colour as the ordinary
links. I was fed up with seeing Blogger's mauve
colour.

To have a go yourselves, you need to go to the
template page, and then scroll a short distance down
the template section until you see, just below “body”
and then “text”, a set of instructions for the links...

a: link
a: visited .... for the visited links
a: hover .... for the “link rollovers”

You can change the colours of these links to
anything you like, and in the “hover” section, you
can change the text decoration from “underline” to
“none”.

There’s a useful set of colour charts on Wikipedia,
which I’ve used a lot. The colours I chose for my
links, to show up on a navy blue background were:
a cool blue … #3A92D3, and cornsilk … #FFF8DC.
To save your new settings, you select the orange
“save template changes”, then the navy blue
“republish”, and when you are 100% published, you
can then have a look at your efforts via the sandy
coloured “View Blog”.

What I think beginners like myself would appreciate
is some help from more experienced bloggers, to help
them do simple things like the above, and advice on
how to create a whole range of effects, such as
banners, interesting backgrounds, and adding
photographs, a hit counter and other stuff to the
column at the side. You will see from the websites
I link to, that there is considerable expertise out
there, but are fellow bloggers willing to share
their knowledge?

I’ve been having a look at a professional web
designer’s site, Gordon McLean’s, about how he
“spruced up” Zoe’s blogsite ... here’s the link
to it, if you’re interested.

I’m interested in doing something similar one day,
setting up my own website with Dreamweaver or
Wordpress, buying a domain name (which costs about
£5 a year from easily.co.uk), and then using
Blogger to host it. I would have to work out how
to blend the two together, and how to set up things
like the comments box and an archives section.

More fun times ahead, then.

P.S. Did you see the two goals Italy scored against
Germany last night? Brilliant goals and an
exceptionally good performance from both teams, I
thought.
(PS: link colour altered slightly on 10 July)