| How To Create Links In WebMedley
What is a Web site without links? It's little more than an online flyer. Links provide visitors to your site the ability to jump from page to page, following the trail of that which interests them most. Links are also a key element in making your Web site engaging and interactive. In fact, "hyperlinks" (where the term 'links' originates) were a technology originally designed to provide an instant interactive 'glossary' effect in electronic documents. It was only later adapted for use on the Internet. A general rule of thumb for creating a link is to put them in any piece of text where you mention something that is covered in more detail on another page in your site. For example, if I were I to write about anchors (which are a special type of link) I would make the word 'anchors' a link to the page where I wrote about their creation. You will want to scatter links throughout your site and WebMedley makes it easy. Here's how...
(The following steps assume that you are already on the WebMedley editing screen for the page you are wanting to create a link on. If you are unsure of how to get to this screen, please refer to the training refresher under the Web Pages section, sub-section "Now you're ready to put content on the pages!")
Step One: Select What to Make a Link
A link needs to be connected to one of two things on your Web page; 1) text or 2) a graphic. Text links are the ones that most  people are familiar with. They look like a word or a phrase in a sentence that is usually a different color (most browsers make them blue by default if you have not yet visited the page or file being linked to or a purplish color if the page or file being linked to is in your browser history which means you have already visited that page or accessed that file). Graphics can also be made into a link. When you visit a Web site and click on a 'button' - that 'button' is a graphic on the page with a link attached to it.
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To select text for a link you would simply use your mouse to highlight the word or phrase you wish to appear on your page as the link.
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To select a graphic for a link, such as the one on the 'Click Here' button, you would select the graphic by clicking on it, causing small drag boxes to appear around the corners of the graphic you selected, making it look like this:
Step Two: Insert the Link
Now that you have selected what it is that will serve as your link, you need to tell WebMedley where you want that link to go. You do that by using the 'Insert Link' button on your toolbar. Clicking on the 'Insert Link' button will bring up the Hyperlink box. You will use this to tell WebMedley what URL you want this link to go. There are two kinds of links you will be creating, either an internal or external link.
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Internal Links - An internal link is a link that connects a visitor on your site to another page or a file that is part of your own Web site. In most Web sites, this is the most common type of link. To create an internal link, WebMedley needs two pieces of information, 1) the Web site that you are linking to, and 2) the page you are linking to. Here's an example of what that looks like:
In this example, the link is being created with the words "summer retreat" and the domain name (or URL) of the church is www.firstchurch.org. So, the two parts of this internal link are 1) the Web site (www.firstchurch.org) and 2) the web page (youthretreat.html). Web pages are referred to by their Web page file names. The Web site and the Web page file name are always separated by a forward slash (it's the same key as the "?" key on your keyboard).
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External Links - An external link is a link to a page outside your site. For example, if your church was trying to sell its old, rusty 15 passenger van on the Internet and you created a link to www.ebay.com, this would be an example of creating an external link. Ebay is not part of your Web site. If someone were to click on that link, they would leave your Web site and go to Ebay's. External links are great for sending people to resources on other sites, but don't use them too much because remember - once someone clicks on an external link, they will have left your Web site and you want to try to keep people at your Web site as much as possible. Usually external links are given their own page in a Web site, such as a 'resources' or a 'links' page or something similar.
The easiest way to get an external link to place in your site (assuming you don't already know what the link should be) is to visit the page and then copy the link out of the address bar in your Web browser. You simply highlight the address by clicking in the address bar field and then hitting CTRL+C on your keyboard (this copies text) then later using CTRL+V to paste the text into the URL field in the WebMedley hyperlink box. The address bar in Internet Explorer should look something like this:
The exact look of the address bar may be different in different browsers, but it should look similar enough to recognize it.
Remeber - all your links, internal or external, should start with "http://". WebMedley puts this in for you in the URL field, but if you are not careful, you can accidentally erase it. Also, if you are cut and pasting in an address from somewhere else, be careful that you do not end up with two "http://" in the link which would be the one that you pasted in plus the one that WebMedley already put there. The Internet is unforgiving of typos and even one character off will make your link unusable.
After putting in the correct address for you link in the URL field, click 'OK'
Step Three - Save Your Page/Publish Your Site
After clicking 'OK' you should see the text you created a link with change color. (If you created a link on a picture, you may notice a colored border appear around the picture, or you may notice nothing at all.) Although the link you just created will look like a link, it will not yet function like one. If you move your mouse over it, you won't see the standard pointing finger. If you click on it - you won't go anywhere. Don't worry! You didn't do anything wrong. This is a function of WebMedley and is done on purpose. Here is why. If the link you created worked right away, and you clicked on it, you would leave the editing screen you were working on. Were you to do this before you had saved your work, you would lose it. That would be bad. So, WebMedley doesn't allow you to follow the links on the editing screen. After you save your page and then publish the site, the links will function on your actual Web page, however. |
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