KYVL: Information Skills Tutorial, Unit 1: How to get from place to place on the Web.
Navigating the World Wide Web
Information Skills Tutorial
Unit 1: Web Basics
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 Introduction 
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 Unit 1 Contents 
Topic: How to get from place to place on the Web.

Overview
Lesson
Example
Practice



Overview

How to move around on the web:
  • Using the navigation buttons.
  • Typing an address in the location box.
  • The web never starts and never ends: you can always move on to the next site.

Lesson

The World-Wide Web is broken up into chunks. These chunks are called "pages." Sometimes a page is called a "home page," when it is the main directory page for a person or organization.

For instance, you can go to the home page for the Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual University and follow the steps from there to, perhaps, the Virtual Reference Desk page (which in turn might be referred to as the Virtual Reference Desk Home Page by the people who use it a lot).

The navigation buttons help you move from page to page on the WWW

These are the navigation buttons in Internet Explorer:

These are the navigation buttons in Netscape:

The "back" button will take you to the previous page you have viewed.

The "forward" button will take you to the next page on your path (will only be active if you have already used the "back" button: the computer can’t guess where you would go next).

The "reload/refresh" button goes out and gets the most recent version of this page.

The "home" button takes you to whatever page is defined as "home" on this machine. If you are using Netscape, you can set "home" in your Preferences. If you are using Internet Explorer, you can set "home" in your Internet Options.

The different parts of the address tell your browser where to go to get the information.

Suppose you have an address of http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/Tour/Quilts/east.html.
The first part before the colon is called the protocol and tells your computer how the information will be transmitted. In this case http, or hyper text transfer protocol, is the protocol.

The next part, after the double slashes and before the first single slash, tells it which machine on the Internet to connect to, in this case, a machine at the University of Kentucky. The machine does not have to have "www" in its name, the UK’s web-based library catalog is at http://commonweb.uky.edu:8000/.

The rest of the address is called the path and tells your computer to look in the Libraries directory, and find the Tour subdirectory, and the Quilts subdirectory of that, and find a file named east.html there. If this didn’t work, and you get a "file not found" error, you might try copying the address, and look at http://www.uky.edu/Libraries, to at least get the UK Libraries page.


Example

Use these links to look at some pages around the web, and your "back" and "forward" and "home" buttons to move around.

Usually, when you see something in blue, it will take you to another place on the WWW when you click on it. Another way to tell if something is a link on the Web is your cursor will change (usually to a hand) when you put it over the link.

The National Rifle Assn http://www.nra.org/
Handgun Control Inc. http://www.handguncontrol.org
The Potomac Institute http://www.potomac-inc.org/index.html
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms http://www.atf.treas.gov/core/firearms/firearms.htm
Practice

If you couldn’t connect to
http://www.nra.org/pressreleases, what would be a good place to try instead?
A.http://www.nra.org/
B.http://www.nytimes.com
C.http://www.pressreleases.com

Unit 1: 3 of 15


Last Updated: 04/18/2000
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