The Bridge Builder's First Abutment: On the Deliberate Placement of the Foundational Internal Link
I remember the exact moment I saw the blueprint for a site that would never be built. It was for a local artist’s portfolio, a sprawling, beautiful mess of a thing sketched on a large sheet of graph paper. The client, a potter with clay still under her nails, had drawn every vase, every bowl, every abstract sculpture she had ever made. Each was a circle, and from each circle, lines radiated outwards, connecting them in a web of ‘influence’ and ‘inspiration’ that was utterly meaningful to her and utterly impenetrable to anyone else. It was a galaxy where she was the only astronomer.
My job, as I saw it then, was to be the cartographer for this unknown world. I would take this beautiful chaos and impose order. I would build hierarchies. I would create a sensible menu: ‘Functional Work,’ ‘Sculptural Pieces,’ ‘Early Period.’ I would force this universe of art to orbit a single, sensible sun—the homepage. It was a clean, logical plan. And it was completely wrong.
The flaw wasn't in the logic; it was in the empathy. My structure would have asked a visitor, perhaps enchanted by a single, glazed bowl, to leave that page to understand its context. It would have asked them to go ‘up’ to a category, then ‘down’ again to find related pieces. It would have broken the spell. The artist’s chaotic map, for all its impracticality, held a deeper truth: her work existed in a network of relationships, not a pyramid of categories.
So, I abandoned my plan. Instead of building a hierarchy from the top down, I started from the middle. I found what I now think of as the foundational internal link. It was on the page for that beautiful glazed bowl. I placed a single, thoughtful hyperlink in the description: ‘This piece emerged from my exploration of oceanic textures, seen also in…’ and I linked directly to another, related vase. No going ‘up’ to a gallery. No menu navigation. Just a quiet, deliberate path to another point of interest.
That first link was the abutment for a bridge. From that vase, I linked to another, and from there to a third. I created loops and pathways that mirrored the artist’s own creative process. The site structure was still there, a necessary frame, but the primary experience became one of discovery, not navigation. The internal links weren’t just connective tissue; they were the curated narrative of her life’s work.
We often talk about internal linking for SEO or for ‘link equity,’ jargon that reduces the practice to a form of digital plumbing. But that first abutment taught me its truer purpose: it’s an act of hospitality. It’s the deliberate, thoughtful placement of a path for a visitor, saying ‘if you found this interesting, then you might also appreciate what’s over here.’ It’s building a web where every page doesn't just exist, but belongs, intimately and intentionally, to every other.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: