Tip 3

Anatomy of a Web Address

You’ve seen them everywhere, even on some state license plates. But what does all those http’s and .com’s mean. Here’s the website that I referenced for the following information:

http://www.googleguide.com/web_address.html

Below is a simplified explanation of what makes up a web address:

First of all, the official computer name for a web address is URL which stands for: Universal Resource Locator.

Here’s a sample URL:

http://www.dunmoreschooldistrict.net

http:// stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and that basically tells the computer that we are looking to “Transfer” “Hyper Text” (a webpage) from the internet to your computer. When typing a web address into Internet Explorer you usually don’t even have to type the “http://” because the computer assumes it.

www stands for World Wide Web which is the body of software rules and protocols that make up what we know as the internet. Just about every webpage you’ll ever view is a part of the world wide web.

dunmoreschooldistrict is technically the “second level domain name”

.net is a an example of a “top level domain name” “.org” is primarily used by Non-profits, “.edu” is commonly used by schools and universities, “.gov” is used by the government, and the now famous “.com” is primarily for commercial websites. Our “.net” is considered a second version of “.com” and is the third most popular ending. Together dunmoreschooldistrict.net could be described as the school district’s “domain name”. We have to register this name to use it.

Now that you know what the different parts of a web address are, here is my website’s URL through our district’s Google sites:

https://sites.google.com/a/dunmoreschooldistrict.net/mr-bennett/Home/tech-tips/tip-2

Notice the https://, the added s tells you that is a secure log-in. Whenever you are shopping online and inputting sensitive data, make sure the s is there.

/mr-bennett/Home/tech-tips/tip-2: If you remember the old old days of DOS (before we had mice and folders on the screen) you might remember switching folder levels using the “/”. If you don’t remember it’s OK but you should know that “/mr-bennett/Home/tech-tips” tells the computer to go to a folder labeled “tech-tips” that is inside a folder labeled “Home”, inside “mr-bennett. All of the sites created through our District wide Google apps are inside the dunmoreschooldistrict.net folder saved by Google on the domain sites.google.com.

/tip-2 is the page you are viewing.

PRACTICE ACTIVITY: How to use this information. Well, if a someone shows you a website that they’d like to reference for a project you can quickly evaluate the resource by looking at the “domain name” at the beginning of the web address. For example, just by looking at the web addresses, can you determine which of these websites would be the most reliable resource for information about the Vikings?

http://www.jerryswackyfunsite.com/something/junk/vikings.html

http://www. uofindiana.edu/anthropology/vikingresearch6.html

TO KEEP ON LEARNING: If you'd like to learn more about web addresses try searching the internet for:

URL

Uniform Resource Locator

What is a domain name

Parts of a web address