Links
Creating links with the WordPress visual editor
When you add links to your website, you need to specify two things:
- the link anchor (what visitors to your site see)
- the link destination (what the link points to)
Open a page or post for editing, select the words you want to use as the link anchor, click the chain link icon in the Visual editor toolbar, enter your link destination and click Insert. There is a detailed walk through for this with screen shots over at WordPress.com: Links
Creating links with with the WordPress HTML editor or in Text Widgets
This might look a bit harder at first, but once you get the hang of it you’ll find links are very easy.
There are two key components to a link:
- the link destination, in the form href=”URL goes here”
- the link anchor
They get put together within an HTML anchor tag.
Here is an empty anchor tag: <a href=”"></a>
Fill in the destination (href, short for hypertext reference): <a href=”http://apple.com/”></a>
Fill in the anchor and you have a link: <a href=”http://apple.com/”>Apple</a>
This is what the link will look like to a visitor to your website: Apple
You can link to any web page on the internet using that method. And also to PDF and other files which have their own URL:
Links to PDF files
Link to a PDF file: <a href=”http://mysite.com/myfile.pdf/”>My PDF File</a>
Links to Email addresses
You can also link to email addresses, which uses a different href – that uses mailto: in front of the email address as the href:
Link to an email address: <a href=”mailto:me@mydomain.com”>Email Me</a>
If you include an email address in your website, it is a good idea to use an email encoder so the email address is not available to spambots in plain text. Use the Email Address Encoder to convert your email address first, then use it to replace your standard email address in your mailto link.
