Links are comprised of two parts: the link text and the URL:

• Link text is the underlined text that the user sees on the web page
• URL is the underlying web address that the link takes the user to when they click the link text.

There is no functional correspondence between these two parts; a link whose text says “American Centuries” can contain a URL that links to this website or somewhere else. Try it:

American Centuries and American Centuries.

When creating a link in WordPress, select the link text for the link and in the tool popup, click the link icon:

this will open another box that let’s you browse for the page you want to link to:

In the field that says “Search or type URL” enter a distinctive word or phrase from the page you want to link to. For example, to link to the lesson page entitled “The Dedham Deed” you might enter the word “Dedham”. Then select the desired page from the list of search results:

Notice that below the page’s title (“The Dedham Deed”) you can see the page’s web address in gray. Since some pages on the site have similar page titles, always double check the web address to make sure you’re selecting the correct page.

Link text

The text of links should match the title of the page being linked to, this reinforces to the user that they landed on the page they intended. Link text such as “click here” are not a good practice and they also impede the site’s search engine optimization.

Links to external websites

External websites and PDF files should always open in a new browser tab. To make this happen, make a link as describe above, but rather than searching and selecting a page from the Centuries website, in a separate tab, browse to the page you want, copy the entire URL from the browser’s location window and paste it into the URL field of the link tool. Once you’ve created the link, click in the link text and click the pencil icon to edit the link so that it opens in a new tab:

NB: It’s best to avoid linking to an external website as over time, these websites can be taken down or changed which will cause the link you created to no longer work. When a visitor clicks that link, they’ll get a “Page Not Found” message. This makes our website appear neglected and unreliable. The best way to provide our visitors with external resources is to provide the necessary information about the resource to allow the visitor to easily do a web search for it themselves.

Links to PDF files

First you need to upload your PDF file from your computer to the Media Library. Once the file is uploaded, WordPress displays a button labelled “Copy URL to clipboard”. Click that button, then return to editing your web page and follow the steps above to create a link to the PDF. In the URL field, rather than searching for a web page as the URL, paste in the URL that you just copied from the Media Library. Be sure to edit the link so that it opens in a new tab.

Always check your links!

after making a link and saving your page, always view the page and click the links to make sure it goes where you intended it to go.