Website Names
A website or webpage name is called a URL. URL stands for Universal Resource Locator. A URL is an Internet address - it tells you where a Web page is located, just like a street address tells you where to find a particular house. Every page on the Web has it's own unique URL. Just type the URL into your Web browser's address bar and press Enter - your browser will find that page for you. Once you get a little familiar with URLs, you can read and understand them quite easily.
The URL for this site is ..
The URL for this page is ../computertips/urls.htm
The first part http://www means that this address points to a standard Web page. Most Web addresses begin with http:// so they are often listed without it (just to complicate matters!) So if you enter a URL without the http:// into the address bar of your browser, it will "assume" that you have typed a URL and add the http:// automatically.
The second part, secretsof is the domain name of the website. Businesses and organizations generally try to get a domain name that matches their business name. Obviously this makes their URL easier to remember and their site easier to find. If a domain name is not already taken, you can register it for your own use.
The final part which we'll call the suffix (.com in this example) tells you something about the kind of site it is. In this case the .com shows that it is a commercial site. Other common suffixes include:
.net - sites owned by an Internet Service Provider
.edu: educational institutions, like colleges and schools
.gov: governmental agencies and bureaus
.mil: military agencies
.org: nonprofit organizations and personal pages
If there are symbols such as url.htm as on the URL for this page - it indicates a sub-page on the website actually called url.htm. Your browser needs to know exactly where to find the page on the website you are pointing it to. Most webpage names end in .htm or .html because they are written in html language - the language of the Internet.
A domain's suffix can also tell you what country a host is in. Sites in the United States do not have any additional suffixes, but other countries have unique designations. Some of the most commonly seen are:
.au - Australia
.ca - Canada
.ch - Switzerland
.de - Germany
.il -Israel
.it -Italy
.co.nz - New Zealand
.jp - Japan
.uk -Great Britain
.za - South Africa
The main part of the URL, the hostname, can be written in either lowercase or capital letters. So, you could write either www.secretsof.com or WWW.SECRETSOF.COM. But anything that comes after the suffix (.com in this case) IS case-sensitive. So if you do see file names written in some combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, make sure you've typed them into your browser exactly as they appear.
If you think this excerpt was helpful and informative
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