Creating Links With SiteGrinder

One of the great advantages that reading or studying online has over using printed materials is the ability it offers to quickly jump from one article or website to another as new ideas occur. The ability to follow a hyperlink that takes you from one web article to a new piece with related information makes gathering facts fast and easy. Like most of my fellow web designers, I often find the need to insert links within my blocks of text to help my readers get the most out of my content. SiteGrinder makes it easy for me to link from one page to another within my site, or to link to other areas of the World Wide Web. Here are a few things you should know about making hyperlinks when working with SiteGrinder.

Using URLs

One very simple way to insert a link into a portion of your text is to type a URL where related content can be found. You do not need to include the http:// part of the address, just something like www.myawesomesite.com. SiteGrinder will recognize this bit of text as a hyperlink and make it clickable. This is very handy if you just want to direct visitors to a particular page of your site, for example. You could say “Find great bargains here: www.bargaincenter.com.” You can also make email links by using the standard form for an email address, without the mailto prefix and SG will support this, as well.

Making Links from Words or Phrases

If, however, you want to make just a word or two into a link in order to preserve the more natural flow of your writing, SG allows you to do this with ease. Let’s say that you would like to include a link to your “gift ideas” page from within an article on your toy site. You might write something such as “Wooden toys make great gifts for toddlers” and make the word gifts clickable. This is done by using two text layers.

In this case, you need to make a layer of text that contains the word “gifts,” and label it with the -text hint. Let’s call it giftideas-text. Now, create a new layer that contains the URL of the page you are linking to along with the word or words you are using as a link. Use the same label for this layer, but with the -link hint. Therefore, it would be called giftideas-link. When SiteGrinder sees two layers like this with matching labels, it knows how to link them together.

Link Example

You can do this for as many words or phrases in your block of text as you want. It might sound a little complicated, but read through this example to see how straightforward it really is.

Let’s say your website includes this sentence. “I found a great photo of a toddler using his wooden wagon on this website. To see more pictures, email me.” This example requires links to three different places on the web, but only requires two layers in SiteGrinder to make it happen. The first layer should have the anti-aliasing set to “none” or have the

-text hint inserted. It would contain only the content as written without any URLs, and be labeled “woodenwagon-text.”

The second layer would be labeled “woodenwagon-links,” and would look something like this.

photo

www.greatphoto.com

wooden wagon

www.mysite/giftideas.com

email me

myemail@mysite.com

You will notice that the clickable words are placed on one line with the appropriate link on the next line. The links are separated by at least one empty line. SiteGrinder uses this layer as a key in order to know which words should be linked to which sites.

This feature of SiteGrinder is one of my favorites as a web designer, because it easily allows me to inter-link my web pages. This is a practice that the Search Engines love, and my readers benefit from, as well.

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