Using website addresses and bookmarks
Using website addresses and bookmarks
What's coming up
Using a search engine is a great way to find websites, but if you know the address of the website you're looking for you can go straight to it.
In this activity, you'll find out how you can open a website by typing its address and how to bookmark your favourite website for future use.
Start activityWebsite addresses
A website address is made up of several different parts. Let's take a look at each in turn.
Getting started
The first part – https:// tells the web browser how to use the information that follows.
Fortunately you don't need to remember to enter this, as your web browser will automatically add it for you.
The www
www stands for World Wide Web and tells the browser that you've entered a website address.
The website name
The next part is the main bit of the website name. It should match the name of a company, product or service represented by the website.
The letters at the end
There are so many websites that we'd soon run out of possible names without a way to split them up further. The letters at the end help do that.
There are lots of different letter combinations you might see at the end of a website address, one of the most common is .com.
The address bar
If you already know the address of a website you don't need to use a search engine. You can simply type the website address into the address bar of your browser.
Remember, you don't need to enter the https:// part of the address as the browser adds this automatically.
The ABC's website has the letters .net.au after its name, so if you wanted to go to the ABC's website, you would type www.abc.net.au in the address bar.
Using the address bar
When you open a browser the address bar will automatically contain the address of a pre-set website. This is called the homepage and is often either the website of the company providing the internet service, or a search engine.
Whatever the address of the homepage is, you can delete it and enter the address of the page you want.
Let's walk through the steps needed to enter the address for The National Library of Australia, which is www.nla.gov.au.
Selecting the address bar
First, we select anywhere in the address bar.
Typing the new address
Next, we need to delete the existing website address and type the address of The National Library of Australia website, www.nla.gov.au into the address bar.
We then press Enter.
Success
Finally, The National Library of Australia website opens.
Notice that we don't need to include https:// as this was automatically added when the website opened.
Bookmarks
Entering a website address is quicker than searching for a website but opening a website would be even quicker if we didn't have to type the address every time. That's where bookmarks can help.
Bookmarking a website is like bookmarking a page in a book - it helps you find the page you want quickly in future.
Different browsers have different names for bookmarks. For example, Chrome and Firefox call them Bookmarks but Internet Explorer calls them Favourites. They all mean the same thing and work the same way.
Adding a bookmark
Let's go through the steps for adding a bookmark for the ABC website so that you could find it quickly in future.
Select the Bookmark symbol
First, we select the Bookmark symbol, a star, which in this example is in the top right corner of the menu bar.
Confirming the name
By default, bookmarks are saved to the Bookmarks Bar so that they can be found quickly later.
We can enter a name for the bookmark or keep the suggested one. In this case let's keep Welcome to ABC.net.au
We'd select Done to save the bookmark.
The saved bookmark
After we have saved the bookmark we can see a link for the website in the Bookmark Bar.
The next time we want to open the ABC website we could select this link to go straight to there without needing to enter the address.
eSafety Tip
You can check a website’s safety rating before visiting it. Go to this website: https://safeweb.norton.com/ and then type in the address of the website you want to visit. Then click 'enter'. You will see results showing how safe the website is.
Congratulations!
Well done, you've come to the end of the Searching using website addresses and bookmarks activity.
You've found out how to open a website using the address and use bookmarks to save your favourite websites for quick access later.
In the next activity, Searching websites, you'll find out how to look for something on a specific website.