Imagination

Once you've looked at other pages on the world wide web, you'll notice that lots of people use buttons or other images for their links, and choosing the right images can make it much easier for people to find their way around.

As well as individual buttons, another popular way of adding links to a page is by using image maps. An imagemap is a picture that appears on the page and can be clicked on. The co-ordinates where you clicked are sent to the web server, and the appropriate page appears. So, if you want to have a completely graphical web page, giving you control over how everything looks, you could create a large image with built-in buttons.

Remember that if anyone isn't looking at images, they won't be able to find out anything useful from your page, so it's vitally important that you have ordinary text links underneath the picture - or a clear link to a text only version of the page.

Problem number two is the size of the pictures that you'll end up creating if you want to pack a lot of information on to the screen. And problem number three is that there's no single way to create an image map - it depends on what sort of web server you're using.

You might get the impression that image maps are a bad idea. They're not, but you should certainly think before you use them. For instance, lots of people use image maps to put button bars on their page. If you're tempted by the idea, consider using a series of graphical buttons right next to each other instead. On the down side, you'll have lots of images, but you'll also have a page that can display different text for each button, and will work whether people are using a graphical web browser or a text based one.