Problem: Remove Domain When Creating Link

I've created an address book, and each user's record has a few fields that hold their website URLs. Each time I query the database for a record, I save the URLs as string variables... website1, website2, and website3. In the webpage to view each member's profile, I code their websites like so:

<a href='<% =website1 %>' target=_blank><% =website1 %></a>

The problem is that the domain where I host the page gets appended to the front of the string. So if a user enters something like me.blogspot.com as their webpage, it actually links to "http://www.mydomain.com/myrootfolder/me.blogspot.com/" when it's supposed to just link to "http://me.blogspot.com"

Is there a sure-fire way to solve this problem?