Missing Links

Our younger students still bring home flyers for stuff, but our older students don’t. It’s not that they forget the flyers, rather the non-elementary schools don’t hand out papers. We get emails and such. The day before picture day, I asked the boys about picture ordering information since I hadn’t received an email. “I think it’s on the website or something.” was the answer I got.

So I went to the school website. Here’s a snippet of that page.

image of school picture day announcement

If you notice the top part of the announcement, it has a link to Order Information. I clicked that link, expecting it to take me to the studio’s website or something.

It took me to a PDF of the flyer.

That PDF, naturally, had the studio’s website address printed on it. But it wasn’t clickable.

So I had to type in the URL that was on the PDF. First-world problems, I know. I just found it amusing that in this day and age, people aren’t thinking of providing links directly to active content. Links have been around for over 20 years now. It should be the first thought of the website person. I don’t know who runs the school website – maybe it’s a teacher or administrative person who got saddled with that task and is doing the best he can. That’s why I didn’t complain to the school. I simply provided it here for the entire internet to see.

I suppose that since it was originally on the school website, the whole internet could have already seen it. In that case, I provide it here to serve as a lesson for all you web developers: if you create a link to a static document or image, and that document or image has a website or other such link printed on it, you can make everyone else’s day a little easier and brighter by providing a clickable link to that content. Allow people to bypass the middleman.

A scoffer seeks wisdom and finds none, But knowledge is easy to one who has understanding.

Proverbs 14:6

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This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 6:59 am and has been carefully placed in the Technical category.

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