The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Creating Hyperlinks

As I’ve been doing this blogging thing a little while now and it seemed a good idea to pass on a few of the things that I’ve learned over the five years that I’ve been doing this. In easy and often geeky steps you’ll be taken through the steps and point out the pitfalls of taking your blog seed and growing it into something really amazing.

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Adding a Hyperlink

In the blogging world we might want to create a link to another post in our blog or to some other material elsewhere, this is done by creating hyperlinks. In case anyone reading this needs to know, a hyperlink is a link to some other part of the internet, a shortcut if you like, in a blog post they usually appear as blue text.

Needless to say as with everything else in the blogging world there are some guides to hyperlinks.

Firstly how to create a hyperlink, there’s two ways here, either highlight some text or just click on the hyperlink button. This is on the toolbar between the quotes button and the numbered list button.

This window pops up, the only thing that changes is if text was selected this will appear in the Link Text box. If we keep this simple it’s best, copy the web address from the website that the hyperlink will go to and paste (CTRL + C to copy CTRL + P to paste) it into the URL box.

Alternatively as it can be seen in the image WordPress help to link to posts and pages in your blog and it’s searchable. Select the desired post or page.

Now we click ok right? Hang on – this is the bit I’m bad at and it’s where there’s a little trick. Near the top there’s a tick box. Open Link in new window / tab looks a bit boring but it has a purpose. Click on this before pressing Add Link. The reason for this is that it opens the link in a new tab in the reader’s browser, keeping your blog page open.

Now you think I’ve gone mad – but no. We want to try and keep a reader on our page and reading our stuff right, so this lets them read the link but keeps  the original post open. This keeps them on your site longer and maybe looking at more stuff. It’s the little things you see.

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Adding a Hyperlink to an Image

I’ve had mixed success at this, that’s just a little disclaimer here. I don’t know why but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But to do it add an image from the media library. When the image is added select it and then click on the hyperlink button and this should turn up.

Notice that the link text is gone, but add the URL to the site or select the post from the list as before, make sure the Open link in new window / tab box is checked and then Add Link.

This should do it… but like I say it hasn’t always worked for me.

So there’s hyperlinks, were there any surprises in there for you? What experiences have you had with hyperlinks that were maybe not what you expected?

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Another Geeky Guide to WordPress will be out next week, let me know if there’s something you would like covered or something mystifies you about WordPress. It takes a while to learn this and I nearly gave up, so don’t panic if you don’t get it.

 

Planet Simon

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