URLs and linking

This is a URL (uniform resource locator):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator

URLs are part of what make the Internet the Internet, enabling direct links between websites.

These direct links aren’t very useful as text. For example, if you wanted to navigate to the site above, you would have to manually select the URL, copy it, and paste it into your Web browser. This is a cumbersome practice.

When you create your websites for this course or refer to information that is on the Web in your forum posts—such as references to other websites or references to pages on this course site—you should make those links clickable, html links.

Creating links

WordPress makes it easy to create links in a post (see the directions here). Here’s the result:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator

Best practices for links

Because HTML allows you to make any text (or image) into a link, it is not a good idea to use the actual URL your are linking to as the text for your link. See how it is more difficult it is to read the sentence above if I use the URL instead of a word in the sentence for my link?

WordPress makes it easy to create links in a post (see the directions here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/links/).

For these reasons, when it is possible to make a direct link, as on this site or on your own websites, you should almost always make clickable links with contextually appropriate text instead of a URL.

Only use the URL when the URL itself is important information. For instance, it would be okay to make a clickable URL for your link to your personal website on the personal website forum this week because the URL is the information you are sharing.