Inserting Links in Stories in NCS Content#

REGARDING HYPERLINKS

Adding hyperlinks to stories is strongly encouraged. Linking to previous stories on an ongoing issue, linking to government, company or organization sites provides context and other information sources for readers. It also enhances our reputation amongst search engines.

Adding hyperlinks is easy in NCS Content. However, there are some caveats.

URL Formats

Generally, you see URLs in one of three formats:

* The full URL: **http://www.theday.com**. 
* URL without protocol designation: **www.theday.com**.
* Shortened URL: **theday.com**.
* Hybrid URL: **portal.ct.gov**.

As far as NCS Content’s Lite Editor is concerned, the first two formats are fine. The third and fourth, however, will cause the link to be rendered incorrectly once it’s published to the website.

Getting it right

To make sure URLs are rendered correctly within stories, the best approach is to actually visit the site you are linking to and copy the URL from the browser’s URL bar. Then paste that into the link field.

If you decide against copy and paste, then you MUST manually add “http://” or https:// to the beginning of any URL that doesn’t start with www or http://.

(You’ll note if you paste “www.theday.com” into the URL field and click “OK”, the Lite Editor will warn you that “http://” is missing and will insert it for you. It won’t do that for theday.com alone, because it sees that as an internal, relative link. Internal links are designated as such by the omission of the http:// portion of the link.)

So, theday.com must be typed in as https://theday.com; portal.ct.gov must be typed in as http://portal.ct.gov.

In practice, copying and pasting from the browser’s URL bar is the safest approach.

Broken links are frustrating to the user! And they can have an impact on our Google rankings.

A QUICK HOW-TO

FIG. 1 – Select the text you’d like to highlight as the link Then click the “Link” icon. FIG. 1 – Select the text you’d like to highlight as the link Then click the “Link” icon.

FIG. 2 –Paste or type the URL; makes sure the URL contains the ‘http://’ prefix. FIG. 2 –Paste or type the URL; makes sure the URL contains the ‘http://’ prefix.

FIG. 3 – Your selected text should now be highlighted in blue and underlined, indicating it is a link. FIG. 3 – Your selected text should now be highlighted in blue and underlined, indicating it is a link.