I created a button...
This is where you've gone wrong. You haven't created a button, you've created an anchor element. If you had used a button element instead, you wouldn't have this problem:
If you are going to continue using an a element instead, at the very least you should give it a role attribute set to "button" and drop the href attribute altogether:
Once you've done that you can introduce a piece of JavaScript which calls event.preventDefault() - here with event being your click event.
