Internal links

The easiest way is to make use of the ‘Hyperlink’ icon on your toolbar in the content preview. When you are editing a text (for example, this could be a product description or a page text) in the WYSIWYG editor or in the preview, use the mouse to highlight the word or words that will form the link. Then use the “Insert/edit link” function from the toolbar above.

A selection dialogue appears.

Nearly all available pages of your shop are listed in the tree structure of the dialogue. Select one of these and then click on “Apply”. If you want to change the linked page, highlight the word again and select the same function.

In the “Additional links” list, you will find the pages that are not contained in the tree structure. Use this list, for example, if you want to create a link to the contact form.

Now you may also want to link to pages that are neither in the tree structure nor in the list below it. For example, the product comparison page. To find out the correct link to the page, simply open it in your shop. For our example, the URL ends with:

?ViewObjectPath=/Shops/<YourShop>&amp;ViewAction=ViewProductComparison

Copy this part of the URL, i.e. from the “?” to the end. Go back to the WYSIWYG editor, highlight the word for the link and insert the part of the URL you just copied into the link field. Make sure to delete the preceding “http://” text there.

External links

For links to external pages, you must always use the complete URL to the external page – and this is very important – using the leading “http://”. Never start the link with just the “www”! If the link is to a secure page, then the URL must start with “https://”.

External links are frequently used in conjunction with images or logos. Here again, there are several things to be aware of.

In HTML, this looks as follows:

<a href=”http://www.epages.com” target=”_blank”>

<img src=”/WebRoot/Store/Shops/<YourShop>/MediaGallery/ePages.jpg” alt=”ePages.jpg”/>

</a>

If you were to do all of this in the design or preview area, nearly everything would be created correctly automatically. In this case, you would only be able to correct the “alt” attribute, since the filename of the image is simply entered there for the time being. If you click on the image again in order to highlight it and then select “Insert/edit image” in the toolbar, you can edit the image description and the title. This information is very important for the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your shop.

However, two things are important here: You must have the rights to use the image and you must upload the image to the file manager in your shop. The image should not be located on a different server, i.e. from our example above, the part after the “src=” must always begin with a so-called ‘relative link’ which starts “/…”.

Never start the internal link with “http://”. This would be a problem when a user logs in, registers or enters into the order process and the shop switches to a secure connection (SSL encryption. The consumer’s browser would see the image is not “https” and flag it up as an unsecure element on the page. Messages like this will cause doubt of the sites security and are likely to abandon any shopping they have so far. Using ‘relative links’ insures the image liunk has the correct prefix in front of it at the right time.

One last note: You should be able to use linking, especially internal linking, without any problems if you take these hints into account. Search engines like to see internal links (SEO!) – profit from the features that your shop offers you!