linking a picture on main page to a category

hi, what i want to do is have 3 pictures on my main page that when you click them take you to their respective catagories.

atm i have them in the define_main_page.htm file so they load up on the main page.

what do i type for the link address or how do i do it ? ive got

<a href=""><img src="images/banner1.jpg" width="200" height="200" alt="Adults" title="Adults" /></a>
<a href=""><img src="images/banner1.jpg" width="200" height="200" alt="Kids" title="Kids" /></a>
<a href=""><img src="images/banner1.jpg" width="200" height="200" alt="Fightware" title="Fightware" 

how do i actually link them to the catagory pages though ?

i feel like im going about this the wrong way

What you have is fine, but you need to put the path to the categories inside the quotes here: <a href="">. You can navigate to the category in question and Copy the URL from the browser address bar and Paste it in the <a href="">tag. In a stock Zencart installation with sample products, the link to the Hardware category would look like this:
<a href="http://www.stevesh.org/demo/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1">

You have done nothing wrong; you simply need to add the URL for each category page to the href="" section. Go to the correct page, copy the URL from the address bar, and paste it into your code.

IMPORTANT: do not include any &zenid=xxxxxxx that may be shown. Also, make the URL relative instead of absolute by stripping the www.yoursite.com/ from the front, leaving only index.php?main_page=index&cPath=123 or whatever your exact path is.

Are Adults, Kids, and Fightware, your only categories?
If yes you could just enable the categories to alway show on mainpage, and associate the image in the category creation.

at the moment they are, but there may be more added later im not sure, just setting this up atm. thanks for you help guys :)