When I took the position of web editor at my previous job, there had never been a web editor on staff before. I had little supervision, no mentoring, and limited experience. Saying I had to “wing it” is a bit of an understatement. One thing that came up all of the time when adding content on our CMS was whether a link should open in the original window or a new one. The intuitive answer is, of course, a new one. Why would you send users away from your site? So, each time I added content, I ticked the box or wrote the HTML code that would signal the link to launch in a new window.
It wasn’t until Sarah mentioned in class last week that this was a mistake that I started to ponder the pros and cons of internal and external links. And then this week’s reading 18: HTML Links – Let’s Build a Web! really hit home by putting external links in the context of frames and pop-ups. (The rest of the tutorial is worth checking out, too.) And there are good discussions on the topic on ProBlogger and SEOBook
I’ve also been working on a blog on the New York Times coverage of this whole swine flu thing, and I’ve noticed that it is near impossible to find a link on nytimes.com that points to a non-NYT page. Annoying.
You’ll notice that for the first time in this blog the links open in the main window.
As web editor unfortunately while you can certainly advise on best practise you may well be overruled in issues which are seen to put the reader experience over the needs of your business (in this case, the need to try to keep traffic/page views/ad views up by opening links in a new window).
Thanks for linking to the article on ‘link hoarding’ – it’s reminded me to talk about this in my next class!