Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what a portal, web server or IP address is. I took a quick poll at my place of employment, where use of the intranet is a daily occurrence, and many of them couldn’t explain it either. I will take you through what they mean and how to feel like an “Internet Rock star”. Let’s start with Web Site- Portal. When you first sign on to the intranet and bring up a particular business, organization or family’s website, it will bring up the first page. This is probably an exciting looking screen that makes you want to look further into that topic. It will have contact info, product or relevant information listed on it. It is usually organized in an easy to read and navigation manner that can take you to other screens with what you’re looking for. These pages take you through the website and are simply called web pages. Every web page has another important address to know about is the URL or Uniform Resource Locator. There are a few parts that make up this address:
protocol http:// domain name msdn.microsft.com path en-us/library/ file name aa47.aspx
There are many different websites, specifically news or weather, or broad topic websites that provide links to other websites to get you the information that you want. These are called web portals or just portal. Take the general interest website, www.tripadvisor.com, the winner of the best General Interest Website in 2011 by the Web Marketing Association. From there you can book an entire vacation with recommendations on restaurants, places of interest, weather – just everything that you need to know about your destination.
Let's move on to Web Servers now that you know a little about websites and portals. Your computer has an application installed on it that is referred to as the “client”. When you input that web address or topic in your search or address bar, in that split second, that request travels to a server (or another computer) that gives you that website. This other computer can be located anywhere globally.
Your computer has a special number that identifies you called an IP Address. This is how the information comes back to you – the server knows to send you the information by this address. Because this number would be difficult to remember, a simpler way for us to remember this is through a domain name. Like above tripadvisor.com is a domain name. That company owns that domain name. It is associated with that IP address that is stored in a DNS (Domain Name System) that keeps track of all of these names and numbers.
For more information on how to get around a web page, please view my video in the previous post – I’m sure it will be very helpful.
Happy Browsing!!!
References used:
Shelly,G.,Napier,H.A., Rivers, O. (2010). Discovering the Internet. Massachusetts: Course Technology, Cengage Learning
http://www.webaward.org/winners_detail.asp?yr=all&award_level=best&category=General%20Interest
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