Inserting a Link

There are four types of links you can insert into a page on the School site — internal, external, e-mail, and anchor:

• Internal: A link to a page, image, file, or any other item that resides within the School Web site.
• External: A link to anything that’s not part of the School site
• Mail: Link to an e-mail address so that when someone clicks the link, it automatically creates a new e-mail message in whatever e-mail application they are using.
• Anchor: This is sort of a subset of internal links. An anchor is a placemarker that you insert somewhere on a Web page. A link to an anchor would take you directly to that spot on the page rather than the top of the page.

To insert a link, go the page where you wish to add the link, click “Edit” to enter editing mode.

In the Body Text box, select the text or image that you wish to turn into a link. Then click the Insert/Edit Link icon in the toolbar.

This brings up a dialog box with three columns:

The next step differs depending on what type of link you want to insert.

To insert an internal link, you find the file in the center column of the box and select it. The center column is a like file browser for the Web site, and it shows the list of items in the folder you are currently in. You can move to another folder by clicking “Up one level” (above the center column) and choosing another folder. You can also click the “Home” link in the left column to go to the root folder of the Web site and pick a folder from there. When you see the item you want to link to in the center column, click the circle in front of it.

To insert an external link, click the External link in the left column. The right side of the dialog box will change to show a “Link URL” field. Enter the address of the page you want to link to in that box.

To insert a mail link, click the Mail link in the left column. In the right side of the dialog box, enter the e-mail address and, if you would like, a default subject line for the e-mail message that will be created when someone clicks this link.

To insert a link to an anchor that exists on the page you are currently editing, click the Anchors link in the left column. The right side of the dialog box will show a list of anchors on the page, if there are any.

To insert a link to an anchor that exists on another page, navigate to that page in the center column as if you are inserting an internal link. Click the circle in front of the page you want. If there are anchors on that page, a dropdown list will appear in the right column. Select the correct anchor from that list.

When you’ve selected your link using one of the methods above, click the “Insert” button at the bottom of the dialog box. The box will disappear, and the link will be inserted. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save”.

Note: You can of course link to a page that’s part of the School site simply by copying and pasting its URL into the Insert/Edit Link dialog box as an external link instead of adding it as an internal link by finding it in the file browser. However, we strongly encourage you to use the internal link function as much as possible because 1) if the page you are linking to is moved to another part of the site in the future, an internal link would remain intact whereas an external link would be broken, and 2) if someone tries to delete the item you are linking to, they will get a warning message showing them all pages that are linking to that item using internal links. This would give them a chance to update the links on those pages before deleting the item.