The Address Bar.
Address Bar
This just happened yesterday at work so I wanted to mention a quick thing about the difference between the “address bar” and the “search entry” on your web browser. I’ve had a number of calls from people who use their web browsers search entry field as the address bar.
The problem is that what they are doing is asking a search engine such as google.com or yahoo.com to find the address they entered instead of going directly to that address using the address bar. The easy way to make sure you are in the address bar is to look for the full “http://” address for the site you are currently on:
Using the address bar you are telling your web browser exactly where you want to go on the Internet. If you use a search field in the browser you are then asking the search engine to find things that match your search request. This may be the site you are looking for but it may not be. If you know the domain name or website address just use the address bar and be sure you are going to the correct page.
Quick Tip
If you need to change the address that’s currently in the address bar to a new one you first need to erase the current address to put in a new one. The easy way to do this is just click the address one time with your mouse and it should highlight the entire address:
Then just type your new address. Since your current address is selected (highlighted) it will be replaced by what you type now. You don’t have to erase it first to then start typing the new address.
If you really want to speed things up you can also use the F6 key on your keyboard to select the address bar so you don’t even have to use your mouse.
**Jim
What is a domain name?
Welcome to Web Hosting Basics where I hope to be able to provide you with a solid basic understanding of what exactly a website is and how to make the most out of the one you have.
If you want to know how to make a website then please keep reading. You don’t need to have a website follow along and learn but having one will make things easier and let you have more fun while doing so.
I use a web hosting service called HostYume.com which I’ve been very happy with but I will do some research on other companies to check out and post my findings here as well for you to check out. Now, let’s get started.
Domain Names
I decided I wanted to start off with the most basic stuff to make sure we are all on a level playing field and not taking anything from granted so I want to talk about the domain name.
Basically a domain name is just something that is easy for a human to remember and it points to the location of the website on the Internet. An example of a domain name is the one used for this website:
web-hosting-basics.com
Did you notice there is no “www” at the front of that? The “www” is not actually part of a domain name and in many cases it is not needed to pull up the website. The “www”, which stands for World Wide Web, is another way to show the domain name you are referring to is for a website, not something to process email or be a database of information.
You can pull up this website by entering the domain name with the “http://” in front of it, this is also used, with or without the “www”, to specify you are talking about a website address. Each of the following two addresses listed below will pull up this website:
http://web-hosting-basics.com/
http://www.web-hosting-basics.com/
The reason why a domain name is so useful is the location of a website on the Internet is managed by IP addresses. These are long series of numbers separated by periods that would be very difficult to remember. For instance, this websites IP address is (209.25.195.50), you can even use that to pull up the website if you wish:
http://209.25.195.50/
Nobody would want to remember the IP addresses for sites they visit, it’s much easier to just remember the domain names such as Google.com, Ebay.com or Microsoft.com. That’s basically the main function of a domain name, it’s something easy to remember to point you to an IP address.
I want to keep these postings short and easy to digest and not flood you with information so I’m going to stop here for now. I have a Microphone being delivered soon so I should start being able to do some audio and video explanations as well.
I hope you enjoyed the first post and feel free to go to the Contact page and email me any questions or suggestions, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks,
Jim