Empty Anchor Tag is Not Clickable

From time to time, not often, but it happens - we here at SiteBoxPro get stumped with browser quirks. Something will work great in one browser, but totally fail in another. We don't necessarily promote one browser over another (Firefox rocks), but we do have to implement websites that work across the most common ones.

With that said, we had a situation that required the use of an empty anchor tag. In FireFox everything worked great, but in Internet Explorer (7.x) it was not clickable. We added a non-breaking space - still no go. After some Google searching we found the solution: add a transparent 1px gif as a background image. Odd right? But it worked like a champ. Here is the info we found:

"Say you have an anchor element that you've given display:block and some dimensions with no content or background image, in order to make a clickable area, but in Internet Explorer it's not clickable. In order to keep the anchor invisible you can add a transparent 1px background-image. Suddenly, Internet Explorer understands that this is a clickable element. "

Thanks to the folks at iBloomStudios! Great post guys - and we wanted to spread the word.

Here is our code:

.polBox {
display: block;
height: 60px;
width: 140px;
position: absolute;
left: 360px;
top: 176px;
background-image:url(/images/transPic.gif)
}

Here is our HTML

href="http://www.siteboxpro.com" target="_blank" class="polBox"


Does my business even need a website?

Yes.

Ok, maybe I should elaborate since a one-word, one-sentance post doesn't cover all the "why"s you might have. But, truly the answer is yes. Without question, your business should have a website. Why not take advantage of a very practical, useful and more importantly - affordable medium, such as the internet.

Now, with that said, does your business website need to be come monster web, with hundreds os pages, links and graphics? Does it need to cost $4000? No. It can be 1 page. That's right, ONE SINGLE PAGE. That page needs to cover the who, what, where, when, why and how or your business. Anything more than that, for the sake of this article, is gravy!

The simple fact is, wait for it....people use the internet! Shocker, right? They use it before they make a purchase, they use it to find businesses and as part of their research. We aren't even going to talk about sites where a consumer can actually make an online purchase.

Another good reason to have a site, even if it is a one-page online-business card site, is to feed other sites. You know why they call it "the web", because it is a woven network of shared\sharable data. Your one-page can be used to feed other pages, such as online yellow pages, listing sites and professional directories, and you, for the most part don't even need to do anything but sit back in reap the rewards.

We hope you would select SiteBoxPro to get your site up and running, but no matter who designs and hosts your website we hope that you would explore the web as a place to promote your business.