tech jargon defined
Domain Names and URLs
A domain name is a unique name on the web just for your website. For example, the domain name for this newsletter is insitesnewsletter.com and the URL (uniform resource language) is http://www.insitesnewsletter.com. The URL is the complete Internet address for your website. Let's take a look at what comprises a URL:
- "Http" is a protocol identifier that stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol; a protocol identifier communicates to the Internet that this is a website. Other common protocol identifiers include: ftp://, news: and mail:.
- We know the website is to be viewed on the world wide web because there is a "www" in front of the name. Some websites do not use the www in front of the domain name.
- insitesnewsletter is your company name; it becomes your domain name when the .com is added to it
- .com (which means "commercial") lets the Internet know this is a top level domain (TLD) as opposed to insitesnewsletter.com/archives/insitesarchives.html which is a page within the domain.
- Some sites have subdomains. A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain; meaning that the main website has another website within it. Subdomains are commonly used by larger organizations for different departments within the organization. The main organization can be: http://mycompany.com, and then have various subdomains for each department: http://accounting.mycompany.com, http://marketing.mycompany.com, etc.
- When you see a slash, a name and then another slash after the domain name (insitesnewsletter.com/archives/), that means you are going to a folder named "archives" within that domain. If there is a filename after the slash (/insitesarchives.html) then that is a page within the archives folder of the insitesnewsletter.com website.
- Pages within sites can have different extensions. The most common is html which stands for HyperText Markup Language. Other extensions include: asp (active server page), php (a recursive acronym for HyperText Preprocessor), htm (same as html) and xml (eXtensible Markup Language).