Hooking up clickable images to your Instant Web Site

To make a clickable image you have to do three things.

• Create the image you would like to be clickable.
• Create an image map file in NCSA format for the image. The map file defines what areas of the picture are "hot spots or clickable" and what to do when someone clicks on that area of the picture.
  For information on how to create clickable images and maps, see Infostreet's World Wide Help on Clickable Images.
• Hook up the image to your web site.

Usually, hooking up your clickable image to your web site requires some special configuration, like setting up the image map program and so on. Infostreet has already taken care of most of the work. All you need to do is put the correct information in your html document.

Where YourMapFile.map is the name of your map file in the form of /X/XXX/YourMapFile.map
and YourImage.gif is the name of your image file in the form of /X/XXX/YourImage.gif

XXX is the name of your site. (i.e. if your URL is http://www.InstantWeb.com/d/dolphin then your site name is dolphin), and X is the first letter of your site name as in d for dolphin

Example:

Assume the you have an image called dolphins.gif that you want to be clickable. Assume you have also created a map file for this image called flipper.map

To hook this in to your html page you would need to put the following line in your html file.

<A HREF = "/cgi-bin/imagemap/d/dolphin/flipper.map">
<IMG SRC = "/d/dolphin/flipper.gif" ISMAP></A>

Lets take this command apart and see what it does.

<a HREF ="...">...</A> - Makes this image a hot spot

/cgi-bin/imagemap - tells the web server where the program is to process the map file. It is very important you always include this.

/d/dolphin/flipper.map - is the name of your map file
(the map file in this example is located in your home directory. If you move the map file someplace else, you need to include the full path name. For example, if your file was in the directory maps in your home directory you would use /d/dolphin/maps/flipper.map as your pathname.)

<IMG SRC = "/d/dolphin/flipper.gif"> - is the name of your clickable image

ISMAP - tells the web server that this is a clickable image

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