Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Styling Links

You can control the basic look of links from the Links category of the Page Properties window (Figure 5-11). To open it, choose Modify→Page Properties→Links (CSS), press Ctrl+J (⌘-J)→Links (CSS), or click the Page Properties button in the Property inspector (this button appears only when you have either nothing on the page selected or you have text selected; it doesn’t appear if you have an image selected, for example). Then click “Links (CSS)”.

The top set of options—font, size, bold, italic—sets the basic formatting for every link on the page. The next group of options sets the color of the links under specific conditions. Web browsers keep track of how a visitor interacts with the links on a page: when he moves his mouse over a link, for example. Each link has four modes (called states): a plain, unvisited link is just called a link; a link that a visitor has already clicked (determined by the browser’s pages-viewed history) is called a visited link; a link that a guest’s mouse is currently over is technically called a hover state (but Dreamweaver refers to it as a rollover link); and a link in the process of being clicked (where a visitor has pushed but not released his mouse button) is known as an active link.

Each of these states provides useful feedback for your visitors, and you can style each one individually. In most web browsers, a plain link appears blue until you visit the page it links to—then that link turns purple. This helpful color-coding lets a visitor ...