I was looking at my e-mail signature this week and thinking about what it needs to say. I then discovered that some of the hyperlinks in that signature were incredibly long – much longer than they needed to be. And I thought that perhaps other people might benefit from similarly shorter hyperlinks in their signatures.
So let’s have look at my old signature:
So let’s have look at my old signature:
Trevor Eddolls CEO iTech-Ed Ltd
IBM Champion
P. 01249 443256 | M. 07901 505 609 | E-mail | Web site |
Blog | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Arcati Yearbook | Virtual IMS user group | Virtual CICS user group
The top line stays the same – it’s good to tell people who you are, your job title, and the name of the company in your signature!
I wanted to keep “IBM Champion” – I’ve been an IBM Champion since 2009.
And the phone numbers haven’t changed since 2004, although the devices I use have. I disconnected the fax a few years ago and finally threw it out last year!
It was that bottom list that caused the issues. My company has a (fan) page on Facebook, and that originally had a URL like http://www.facebook.com/pages/iTech-Ed-Ltd/201736748040. Since then, we’ve set up a username for it, so the address I wanted to publish was fb.com/itech-ed – which is obviously so much shorter. If you haven’t got a short name for your business page, you enter fb.com/username on the address line of your browser. Provided you have more than 25 likes on your page, Facebook will tell you whether you can have a short name for the page and whether your choice is available. The rule is that you only get one chance – so make sure you choose a good, memorable, and appropriate name.
I also wanted to add my Google plus address. The URL for that is https://plus.google.com/u/0/108580724051942905828/posts. You can get a much shorter name by going to http://gplus.to/. I got a short name from there. So, now, my Google plus address is http://gplus.to/teddolls.
With LinkedIn, I managed to change the address for my personal profile from http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3544583 to http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddolls, which makes more sense, but then requires a second click to get to the profile page. You can do much the same.
The Web site addresses I couldn’t really shorten without them losing a sense of where the link would end up. Just using bitly or tiny url wouldn’t have provided any sense of security to an e-mail recipient about where clicking on that link would actually end up.
What I decided to do with the look of my signature was to group social media on one line and other Web sites on a second line. This prevents that line of links sbeing too long itself!
The easiest way to actually create the signature in the first place is to use Word. You can write the text and format it. The clever bit is to take a word – like Facebook – and put in the link. You simply select the word, press ctrl and k at the same time, and put the information you want in the pop-up box (see below).
Select “Existing File or Web Page” from the “Link to:” column on the left side of the box. Across the bottom of the box, it asks for the Address. This is the URL you want your word to hyperlink to. There’s one other clever thing you can do here. Where it says ScreenTip…”, you can enters some information that you want to appear when a person mouses over that part of your signature. So, for example, you might put “Find us on Facebook”, or “Follow us on Twitter” if it had been a link to your Twitter account. Click “OK” to save your changes – obviously! You can do that with each part of your signature. The ScreenTip acts in much the same way as adding a title tag to your html link.
So, not much of a change superficially, but some of those links are now shorter. Which means that my new-look corporate signature looks like:
Trevor Eddolls CEO iTech-Ed Ltd
IBM Champion
P. 01249 443256 | M. 07901 505 609 | E-mail | Web site |
Blog | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | G+ |
Arcati Yearbook | Virtual IMS user group | Virtual CICS user group
You may not be too bothered about the appearance of my signature, but you might like to shorten some of the URLs hidden away in your signatures too.
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