Links in the text of your page

Any text in your page (with the exception of headers and subheaders) can be made into a link.

There are several ways to do this:

• If you like the name of a page given to it in the site tree, you can simply drag the page from the tree to your body-copy box. The link will appear, and the text of the link will be the name of the page.

• Type out the entire URL of your link right in your body-copy box and hit the spacebar--the URL will automatically be linked.

• Type out a person's email address in the body-copy box and hit the spacebar. You'll automatically get a mailto link.

• Select the text you want to make into a link, then drag the page you want from the tree onto your selected text -- a link with be made to that page with your text as the link text.

• Use the link button

  • Find the text in your page that you wish to make into a link and highlight it.

  • Click the link button (Looks like a small length of chain)

  • Decide if you will be linking to a page or to an email address.

    • If you choose to link to a page, make sure that the radio button by External is checked (Example) This is true even if you're linking to a page that you would normally think of as an "Internal" page -- "internal" and "external" mean different things to the CMS.

      • Type or paste the entire URL in the URL box

      • DO NOT set a target, unless you are linking to a PDF. If and only if you are linking to a PDF you may set the target to "New Window". None of the other target options have any use at all. Read more about why you shouldn't open web pages in a new window.

      • Click OK

    • If you choose to link to an email address, check the radio button by E-mail (Example)

      • Enter the full email address in the box labelled "E-Mail"

      • DO NOT enter a subject.

      • DO NOT set a target.

      • Click OK

Some notes on Polite Linking

• Always use link text that describes the page you're linking to. This is both helpful to the user and to search engines. NEVER use the words "Click Here".

• Always warn people if you are linking to a PDF, Word document, Excel Sheet, or anything else that is not a web page. This can be done by putting (PDF) or any other appropriate identifier next to the link.

• Never open links in a new window. This confuses your visitors and make the back button in the browser not work as expected. If a person wants to leave your site, let them--they can only think good of you for it. Read more about new windows.

  There are a few exceptions to this rule:

  • Linking to PDFs. Most people are actually more likely to click the "x" to close a PDF than they are to use the back button to get away from it. This could result in closing their browser altogether, which is usually not what they wanted, so it is acceptable to open PDFs in a new window.

  • Linking to an example image from a tutorial, or a large version of an image in a photo gallery. People are used to having these open in new windows.

  • Linking to a video. This works best if it opens a small window, which cannot be done from the CMS. Talk to mazurr@kenyon.edu if you need to link to a video.

• Check your links from time to time. Links rot. Pages disappear. To avoid broken links, you'll need to keep an eye on your pages.