Understanding Web Addresses

There are two addresses that most of you will no doubt already have encountered they are the:

Website address e.g. http://www.steves-internet-guide.com
email address e.g.

One thing you should notice straight away is how similar they are.

To emphasis this I've highlighted the common component. This is the domain name, which is the Internet equivalent of the telephone number or for standard mail the postal address.

The domain name is the fundamental building block of the web and makes the many Internet services like email, websites, instant messaging etc possible.

Website Addresses

The website address is also known as the URL (uniform resource locator) and is used to locate a web page/document on the web. It consists of three distinct parts:

Protocol: normally http (hypertext transfer protocol)
website: e.g www.steves-internet-guide.com
Web page name e.g index.htm, index.html, index.php

So http://www.steves-internet-guide.com/index.php is the address of my home page.

You should notice a few things about the URL

Forward slashes are used to separate various parts of the URL
dots are used to separate parts of the domain name.
www (stands for world wide web) is a convention and not strictly speaking necessary as the site can be accessed using: http://steves-internet-guide.com/index.php
You don't need to type the entire URL into the browser address bar I almost never type in the protocol but use just www.steves-internet-guide.com instead.

Email Addresses

The mail address consists of two parts:

Mailbox name
Domain name

the two parts are separated by the @ sign e.g.

no-reply is the mailbox name and steves-internet-guide.com is the domain name.

Most newcomers to the Internet use the email services of free providers like Google and have addresses like:

in this case the domain name is owned by Google and in order to use the service you need to create a mailbox name (in this case john). The problem of course is that there are many people with the name john and so you usually end up with a mailbox name like john405 or something equally obscure.

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