Standard Document Link Names - Best way in Wix?

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1

Let’s say I have a bunch of documents of different types (PDF, Excel, Word, etc) that can be downloaded by site visitors.

Typically, when you are at a website with a link to a downloadable document, when you hover your mouse over it, it shows the link address in the browser status bar like this:

This is standard browser behavior, and lets the user know what is about to be downloaded.

This is also good practice, because if I hover over a link where the link text on the page says “Download price list” but the browser shows a link called “www.darknetwebby.com/rh7ef87rgfwr.php” then I know it’s probably not a good idea to click on that link.

So my question is this: What is the best way in Wix to present downloadable documents to end users in a way that adheres to the standard where when I hover my mouse over the download link, it shows “www.my-domain-name/documentname”, or if I want to email or share the link with someone, it adheres to the same standard naming format? That is, it needs to show my domain name and the actual document name in the link, not the cloud link assigned when uploading documents to my website through the Media Manager, which look like this:
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/457bad_f82fc10365194d5abe95d792efd3bc4c.pdf

Seriously, would you click on that link, especially if it has the string “457bad_” at the beginning? I know it’s just happenstance that all of our document links came out that way, but to me that is not a good thing. We have trained our users to look for things like that in order to keep them from clicking on things they shouldn’t.

For PDFs, I’ve looked into the PDF plugin, and that looks promising, because I can now put a PDF onto a hidden page, and then the live link points to that page, which I can give a reasonable name, like “Price-List-2019”. But what about for other documents, like Excel, Word, and other types?

Has anyone else here come up with a good way to do what I’m wanting to do?

Best regards,
Mark

2

Hey
There is not so much you can do about this. Wix handles documents, files and so in their media servers cdn system and all files get a unique GUID when used.

1276×1100 159 KB

You can let the visitor see the name of the file but they will still see the strange filename when hovering over it.

But, I believe that your visitors will trust you in this. If they trust the site they will click it. I think it is a way larger problem that people tend to click on everything without thinking the way you do.

So I don’t see this as a problem and I think you will not get any problems using it.

3

Perhaps I am making a mountain out of a molehill. But we moved to Wix from another place, and our customers are used to seeing it the way I’ve described.

The way you show above is great (thanks for the suggestion!) if I’m using the “Add…Document” way of adding a document link to a page, but we are using multiple ways to link to a document, such as links in a Lightbox. When the end user clicks on those links, it downloads a document with that awful Wix-generated name, instead of the name we’ve given it.

I’ll look more into creating a page that looks nice using the Add…Document method. At least that downloads a document with the original file name. There’s not a lot of customization that I saw with adding a document to a page though (in the short time I looked into it so far), like being able to put the document name to the right side, instead of underneath, and making the icon / text smaller or larger, etc.

4

The OP is correct, this is very NOT good. Existing clients might click, but If I am new to the sight, this would give me the HeBe-Jeebees; I would probably run.

Even if they do download it, its not what I want them to have. The generic (most frequent case) scenario is that the Browser defaults to the (dumb) Downloads folder, where there are already hundreds of items the user has “lost”. Even if he knows where that is, now he can’t find the “PriceList.PDF” he saw on the Website.

It drives me nuts on some big sites where everything I download says document.pdf, this is much worse.