Help: Font size smaller when it's a link

Question

This has been something that's been driving me crazy for over a year and I can't seem to figure it out. After a couple of hours searching online, I thought I'd see if anyone here would be willing to help.
I seem to have no problem changing fonts and sizes in Dreamweaver, but whenever I make text a hyperlink, the size of the link changes to 12 points and nothing I try seems to work. Here's a link to an example page that shows what I've been wrestling with.
http://www.ads-on-line.com/font_test.html
As you can imagine, I'm just trying to make the hyperlinked text to match the rest of the sentence and all the normal ways--editing the html, changing it in the properties box doesn't work..
No doubt it's how the CSS file is set up or the styles I defined at the top of the document. I know very little about CSS, but my guess it's a setting in there that's telling it to default to that 12 point size. This is driving me nuts.
I'd apprecaite anyone who might be able to tell me what I need to adjust or add to fix this.
Thanks!
Bob

Answer 1

In your style sheet at: http://www.ads-on-line.com/new%20site/newer/mgstyle.css you have the following:
a:link {
          color: #22a9e0;
          background: transparent;
          font-size : 12px;
          font-family :  arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
          text-decoration : underline;
          font-weight : normal;
That makes all of your links 12 pixels. If you take out
     font-size: 12px;
from that style sheet, your link should stay the same size as yout text.
There are lots of other issues with your code, though. Check them out with the W3C Validator.
By the way, that style sheet also tells the font size in lots of other links to be 11 pixels, depending on the class of the div they are in.