Do you still receive e-mails with broken links? The sender wants to direct you to a website, but you click and get an error message, only noticing afterwards that part of the web address (URL) is not highlighted as hypertext. Veteran Net users know how to work around this problem. Novices usually give up. Let’s spend a couple of minutes making sure you never send out a broken link again.
First of all, there are websites that will convert your long URL to a much shorter one that likely won’t be broken. Among these are TinyURL and SnipURL. They are free and easy to use. I have used TinyURL for a long time. Just paste the long link in, click and copy the shortened one it produces.
But many of you may have a way to avoid broken links that you may never have tried. Open a new e-mail in Microsoft Outlook, type a few letters in the body and click on Insert on the toolbar. Does an option for hyperlink appear? (This only works for messages in HTML, not plain text.) If so, you should be using this method to insert hyperlinks into your messages rather than pasting in the URL’s. It is much more readable to receive a message that says “Check out this website and this one and maybe this one, too” instead of reading between a bunch of URL’s—and those links don’t break! OBA Family Law Section Chair Keith A. Jones just sent out an e-mail section meeting notice with links to maps to the locations and social event, links to the Oklahoma statute under discussion and other links. It was very slick and very concise because a lot of the information rested behind the links. Try it!