Newbie - using a href wipes out my web-site

Hi
Please any anyone give me a pointer please. I’m using a home website called index.html and an external spreadsheet to style it ok. However I’m trying to open a discussion group website within my website but it over-writes my website:injured:. The link I’m using is :

<li><a href=" http://fishing.my-forums.net">Discussion Group</a></li>

I wondered if anyone could tell me what else I need to put in my html so it keeps the external website within my website or is the problem that its not possible to include it within my website.

Please can someone help

Thank you
David

What do you mean by “opens within your website”? You’ll need to be more precise about what you’re trying to achieve. (It sounds like it’s probably a bad idea, but I’ll wait til you say exactly what you’re trying to do before I say that for definite!)

Hi Stevie

I’ll try to describe this as best as I can. On my website have got a navigation button call Discussion Group. When someone clicks on this I’d like a blog to open up within my web-site so that the user will never leave it. However, the blog is really a link to an external web-site which takes over the whole page. So it just looks as though the blog website has taken over my web-site. So the only way a user can get back to my web-site is to click on the Back button in Internet Explorer. (My website isn’t even properly Live yet so I need to keep as many visitors on it for as long as I can without leaving too early).

There probably is a better way to open a blog so any advise here would be massively apprecicated.

Thank you
David,

so that the user will never leave it.

As a user, it is MY choice to leave a site. Always.

(My website isn’t even properly Live yet so I need to keep as many visitors on it for as long as I can without leaving too early).

Relinquish control today. Users decide how long they stay on a site. You can work very hard to force people, but it will not benefit them. In the old days, people’s CPUs would be working overtime running several instances of their browsers. Then Opera invented tabbed browsing (if not Opera, then some very obscure browser first), everyone else copied it, and now instead of having several copies of the browser open, people can have one browser open with many tabs. This is nicer for most people.

Okay, what you’re talking about when you say “So it just looks as though the blog website has taken over my web-site” is you mean, the link works like normal links do. This is what most (experienced) web surfers expect when they click a link: that they go to a new page in the same browser window, and to go back they click the Back button.

What you seem to want I think is a frame or iFrame within your page. Or the blog to open in a new window so the old window with your page remains. Uniformly a bad idea, but both can be done.

However consider SitePoint. There is a main website, SitePoint.com, with I dunno, articles and stuff on it. If the user clicks “Forums”, they are brought here. The Forums page completely replaces the SitePoint home page. The top looks similar, though, because SitePoint owns both their home page AND the forums, so on the forums pages they put the same menu on top as what you see on the main page (so a user could go back to the main SitePoint page from the menu here on the forums).

Do you own/control fishing.my-forums.net? If you do, you can have that page also have a menu with your home site in it, like SitePoint does.

If you don’t have control, and insist on having both pages show at the same time, you are probably going to have to use iFrames. I wouldn’t recommend this, but it isn’t uncommon (usually, a web site has something like a live weather map on it which actually is from another server, so a completely different address/URL, but sitting on the main page as if it were part of it). You’ll want to make sure that your doctype at the top of your home page’s HTML code matches the doctype at the top of the fishing.my-forums.net’s HTML code. Otherwise IE9 has been showing some nasty behaviour when they don’t match. If you don’t control fishing.my-forums.net, then you’d need to copy their doctype since obviously you can’t change theirs.

This is an interesting post and the comments by readers about how they use tabs (as opposed to new windows) are also enlightening. I think I’m going to post that over in Accessibility.

Hi Stomme
Thanks for your advice - I really appreciated it.

My web-sites still in the early stages so I can easily get a host that gives me full contol/access. In fact the way that Sitepoint navigation links are set up is how I would like my website to work, so that there is always a quick way to get back to the Sitepoint homepage.
Would you say that I will still have to used iFrames or can you suggest a better way. At the moment I’m also trying to integrate phpBB into my website as a dicussion page. I’m also new to blogging so would you also recommend any other free discussion blogs instead.
thanks
David

Would you say that I will still have to used iFrames or can you suggest a better way.

If something like how SitePoint has made their menu the same across their sites is good enough for you, then I would recommend it over frames.

Here’s an example of an iFrame: [noparse]http://www.elektrischescooterwinkel.nl/verzekeren[/noparse] (you’ll have to copy and paste to see this one)

The blueish part with the form in it is from a different server than the rest of the site.

Having the forums be separate like SitePoint does makes way more sense, and gives you more screen room too.

Thanks - just a shame that the site example you gave me is not in English but the main thing is that I know to go with iFrames now.

Thanks for helping me
cheers
David