Links

One of the most important elements of creating your web page is being able to create links. Essentially, these are words or phrases that may benefit from having a separate area of your website or an external site associated to them.

These words or pictures can be clicked on and will open up whichever website you wish your audience to see.

To create a new link, select the text you wish to turn in to a link on the CMS, and on the Editor Toolbar, click on the chain-link on the button row below the printer icon. This will open a new, smaller window that allows you to enter a link (see below for different types of links).

 

Creating an internal link

1. To create a link to another page of your site, simply find the page you're looking for on the dev or live site. You'll only need to highlight the last part of the address. For example, if the page your looking to link to is: gcom.yourcompanyname.co.uk/5/30   You'll need to copy the /5/30
2. Then in the CMS bring up the page that makes reference to the last page.
3. Highlight the word or phrase that you want to be the link and select the link button in the toolbar, this looks like a chain link icon.
4. Paste the copied URL into the ‘Link URL' box and select ‘insert'
5. You have now made an internal link, this will be in blue and underlined on the Live site.

 

 

Creating an external link

1. To create a link to a different website, you'll need to copy the entire line of the website address of which you would like to link to.
2. Then in the CMS go in to the page where you would like to make a link.
3. Highlight the word or phrase that you want to be the link and select the link button in the toolbar, this looks like a small chain link icon.
4. Paste the copied website address into the ‘Link URL' box and select ‘insert'
5. You have now made an external link, this will be in blue and underlined on the Live site.

 

There is one more action we'd strongly recommend. After selecting the chain link icon to make your link,  the third box down says 'Target', from the drop down menu select 'New window (_blank)' and click OK. What this does is when the link is selected, it will open a new Internet browser window, the benefit of this being that your audience can view the external site but also stay on your site, too. This keeps the traffic on your site and won't lose your audience because of this link.

 

Link Checker

The link checker utility will search for broken links under the relevant permissions sets for the usergroup you have selected in the drop down box. If any broken links are found, then these will be displayed in the bottom module. You can then directly edit the relevant page, see the page in the dev site, see the text of the link and click the link itself.

There are limits to what can be checked: this will not check links to external sites or anchor points on pages. It will help you identify where there are links to pages within the site which have failed for some reason.