Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Styling Links

You can control the basic look of links from the Links category of the Page Properties window (Figure 4-11). 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 (the 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). In the Category list, click “Links (CSS).”

Figure 4-11. The Page Properties’ Links (CSS) window lets you set basic properties for the links on a page, including their font, color, and size. This window is mainly a shortcut for creating CSS styles.

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 simply called a link; a link that a visitor has already clicked (determined by your guest’s browser history) is called a visited link; a link that a guest’s mouse is currently pointing to is technically called a hover state, though Dreamweaver refers to it as a rollover link; and a link in the process of being clicked (where a visitor has ...