What a joy to have your very own website so that you can share your interests and hobbies with other people all over the world. Needless to say a website can be used for all sorts of things including an online profile or service and much more.
If you run your very own website and you only have a few website pages published then any future alterations to those website pages is more than easy to do. To delete a published page, make some content changes to a page, or publish a new page is all simple enough to do. But not so easy if your website has lots of pages that are 'hyperlinked connected' to each other. What is a Hyperlink? Better known as a ‘link’ it is how the internet works by linking other websites to each other. Those links are active items of text or a picture with an address link inserted. Links can be an active way to find not only a website address, document or a specific page on a website but also a vital shortcut to such things. Links from one page on a website to another page on the same website works in the exact same way. The internet cannot function without them in fact. The problem with hyperlinks however is if you, or someone else, changes the website address or a specific page address. If you do that then one of a couple of things will happen. Often a message will pop up saying page, or website, not found. It may not be found but there still is a good chance that what you are looking for is still there, unless of course it has been deleted by the site, or page, owner. Some websites will provide a message saying ‘page not found’ and will offer a redirect link to the home site page as an alternative course of action. A very helpful feature at times I must say. In any event if you are hoping for a site visitor to view a specific page, or maybe a paying customer to look at an important business web page then of course that future client could be lost. Therefore when it comes to keeping your website fully active, and seen, with working links it is more than vital to keep everything up to date at all times. In the case of only having a few site pages to deal with, and those pages do not need to be updated, then that of course is not a big problem. However, if you have a big website with maybe hundreds of pages then for sure that will be a very big job unless you keep on top of things. Therefore the main reason why a link ends up not working is when updates to the name of the site or the name or location of a web page are altered. The name itself is not always the problem, I hasten to add at this point, but the name of the hyperlink is. If the link address name is changed then that is when a link is broken. Breaking a link is easy to do if you are not careful. A perfect example is when you add a link to a page at the bottom of some information that directs a site visitor to another page on your website. If then at a future date you rename the page that you wanted that link to go to then although that page is still there the link to it is broken and the site visitor is left with a 'page not available' message. So in that situation make sure you update the link to the updated page at the same time. Sadly not all site pages can remain as they are all the time, sometimes the information or service on that page may need to be removed. Therefore updating the link connection, or removing the link altogether, would be a wise course of action rather than the site visitor being sent to a 'no page available' message. When it comes to running a big website you only have to change one page for it to have a ripple effect throughout the site in some cases, if of course many page links are used for various reasons all over the place. In other words, use site page links wisely as they may become out of date and broken when changes are needed at times. So the next time you see someone crying and they say “I broke my link” remember they are facing a big ‘job of work’ to sort it all out. For a related article on websites click >HERE< and hopefully that link is still working of course? Comments are closed.
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