Information Literacy Skills > URLs - the web address system

Introduction

We often talk about the address of a website. What does that mean? Well, every page that you can view on the web needs to have a unique address so that it can be accessed by your web browser.

The term URL is the correct name for what we refer to as a web address. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator - you only need to remember URL. On most browsers you can see the URL displayed in a box near the top. Here is an example.

DIAGRAM HERE

The first page (often called homepage) of a website is given an address. We will use the BBC website as an example. The address is http://www.bbc.co.uk/ for the BBC. This takes you to the home page. All the other web pages on the site are given addresses based on this. So for example, if you click on tv you will go to the first page of the television part of the website. This has the URL http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/ and you can see that the letters tv have been added to the URL. If you then click and go to the BBC1 part of the television part, the URL is http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcone/ . Usually the deeper you go into a site the longer the URL becomes.

The BBC is an example of where the web designers have used regular and meaningful names for the web pages. This is not always the case. Often obscure codes are used instead. An example of this is the Amazon site http://www.amazon.co.uk/ . If you click on say books, the URL appears to be a complex code. However whether you can easily interpret the URL or not does not really matter as long as each web page has a unique code.

Try This

Open up the Scottish Government website at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/ . As it opens it will add the term home to the URL.

Now try clicking on some of the links.

Note how the URL changes when you do this. You will see that the longer URL relates to the more detailed topics (deeper into the website) you have selected. For example http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics if you click on Statistics.

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