The internet can seem to be quite a confusing place at first as it is made up of millions of pages of information. We have produced this guide to help learn about the wonders of the Net.

What is the Internet?

The internet is a huge collection of computers linked together in a network, usually through telephone lines. It is also known at 'the Net'.

How does the Net work?

There are big computers connected to the internet. To enable each computer on the internet to locate and exchange information with each other, they have unique addresss called Internet protocol (IP) addresses. These addresses are numbers. The IP address for "Woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk" is 194.238.189.6. Numbers are difficult for humans to learn, so each address is also given a name, known as the domain name.

Locating a big computer

Locating the country of one of these big computers is easy. Just look at the last two letters of its domain name. You can also identify what type of organisation the user of the computer is.

This is our schools domain name.

www.woodlands-junior.kent

.sch

.uk/

.sch	The type of organisation we are i.e. a school

.uk/	This tells you the geographical location of the big computer we use i.e. in the United Kingdom.

If we uploaded our website using one of the big computers in the Australia, our address would have ended in 'au' instead of 'uk'

Country Codes	Organisation's Code
au - Australia ca - Canada com - USA de - Germany fr - France nl - Netherlands se - Sweden uk - United Kingdom More Country Codes	ac - an academic organisation co or com - a commercial organisation edu - an educational institution gov - a government body net - an organisation involved in running the net org - a non profit-making organisation sch - a school mil - Military organisation

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'Surfing' the Net - Finding your way around

Every Web page on the Net has an address. These are called Uniform Resource Locators or URLS for short!

There are three main parts to an address (URL).

http://

This specifies the type of document the page is. http:// tells you that this page is a Web page

www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/

The second part is the 'host name/domain name'. This is the name given to the host computer which holds and "serves" a Web site. All Web pages of schools in Kent, are on Kent's computer. This is where I upload our website onto, so you can see it on the web.

News.html

This final part of the address is the 'file path'. It specifies the file in which the page is stored. When I wrote the Latest News page on our site, I saved it as 'News'.