Autolinking and Linkwords
Links are what tie the web together. A web page that doesn't let you click on things that lead to other pages is a pretty sorry excuse for a web page.
OK, you can make manual hypertext links in weblobe, but making and updating manually assigned links is really tedious. Trust me on this, we've been doing it for years and hate it so much that we went to ridiculous lengths to build something that does it for you.
The idea of a system that creates its own text links between pages is a difficult one to explain... it's also one of Weblobe's most powerful features when it comes to saving time and unnecessarily dull grunt-work, so well worth taking a minute to wrap your head around.
Every page has an option to add something called Linkwords; every time you mention a pages' Linkwords in another page, the text automatically becomes a link. Linkwords can be individual words or phrases. No..? OK, it's easier with some examples:
You've made a page called Contact, it contains your contact details and tells people how to get in touch with you. In the linkword box you could put:
drop us a line, get in touch
Now you go to edit your home page. In the text there you put:
Welcome to our new site, drop us a line if you can't see what you're looking for...
drop us a line is automatically turned into a link to your contact page. This will happen on every page where you use the phrases drop us a line or get in touch.
But that's just the start. If you're running an e-commerce site, Linkwords will start drawing connections between the products in your catalogue. Just mentioning that you're stocking a new product on your home page will be enough to create a link to that product's details. If you were to write a short user-guide comparing a variety of similar products on the market, every item you mention in the article would be linked to relevant product details. The more information you provide, the more people will find you through search engines. And with Linkwords, the more of those people will find exactly what they're looking for.
The possibilities are endless... Seriously, we fed it an entire dictionary, where every word in the English language was a linkword to its' definition. Just to be sure. We'll be publishing the world's first completely hypertexted dictionary in the near future...
Another example would be, oh I don't know.. writing some documentation for a new web publishing system. You've got a feature called Link Manager. So in the Help page about Link Manager, you add the Linkwords Link Manager. Then when you get to the end of a page like this, you just put something like:
see the Link Manager for more details on managing your links...
Linkword rules:
- a linkword tells the system what words to turn into links coming in to the page
- they need to be unique and specific to the contents of the page
- case-sensitivity is optional (set in Site: Main Settings)
- they should be separated by commas
Live pages
A page needs to be set Live before other pages will link to it. Taking a page offline causes the system to automatically remove all links to it (setting live again at a later date will also restore those links).