Joomla!® 24-Hour Trainer

EXTERNAL LINKS

You can create a simple link from your site to another website via the External Link menu feature.

In general, I don't like to include links to outside websites on the current site's menus. When users click a link in the navigation, they expect to be taken to another page on the current website. Clicking a link and winding up at another website can be disconcerting when it's not expected. Generally speaking, I prefer to create a dedicated page of content with links to external websites, or use the weblinks component (more on that in Lesson 25).

However, there's a place for just about everything somewhere on the Web. A link to the school district website for an elementary school is a fairly standard feature. Most people aren't surprised to wind up at a different website from the elementary school when they click the school district link.

To create this link, we need to identify our school district website. Since Fictitious Elementary is, well, fictitious, you can make a link to all school districts in my home state of New Hampshire, courtesy of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_New_Hampshire.

Now go to Menus Utility Menu, and select New. In the list, select External Link, the third item from the bottom of the list. You should then see a screen like the one shown in Figure 16-4.

FIGURE 16-4

I'll enter School District Site in the Title ...