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| Internet symbols normally look like the earth |
These things dont even scratch the surface of what the internet is used for, but to try and cover it all would be fruitless. Instead it is one of those things best experienced, and thats why your here!
Today I am going to show you how you get "Online" and where you should start. You'll love it.
Navigation
You move around the internet by going from "Web page" to "Web page". These pages are contained under "Web Sites". When you start, you'll be presented with whatever your computer has set as you "Home Page". This is normally something called a "Search Engine", because you can immediately lookup something when you get online. There's also normally a large, easy to find button that looks like a house and will take you back to your "Home" page.Example: What you are looking at now is a web page, which is part of a website.
Websites have what is called an "Address", which is how you get to them directly. You can type in any address you can remember and go right there. These are normally shown on TV adverts and things like that. These addresses, when shown on the internet, become "Links". This just means that you can click on them and they automatically take you there without having to type it. This is normally denoted by text being underlined and a different colour, like below:
Example: www.google.co.uk
Please note: Links may not say the address they lead too, they can be any text or even images.
"www" is used most of the time and means World Wide Web.
"google" is the actual name of the website or company we want.
".co.uk" is an extension of sorts that means this website is run by a company that operates in the UK.
There are lots of these extensions, .com (Company) to .jp (Japan). It doesn't really matter if a website has a different extension than your country, its just so you can see what audience it is aimed at.
Web pages are what you see, but they must be under a web site address (It's just how it works), and in the address this is represented by a forward slash "/".
Example: http://www.google.co.uk/news
So that address above will link us to the "news" web page within the UK version of the Google web site. Which, in many peoples opinion, is the best place to start on the internet.
You may also have seen the "http://" prefix on the above address, this is something you will see sometimes but it is not always needed. There are many different things you'll find in addresses, but you wont need to know about those just yet.
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| Click to see FireFox |
OK enough theory, lets have a go! First you need to find out if you have a "Browser" installed. This is what displays the information sent out the internet into something you can read and interact with. Seeing as what your reading it a web page, you must have a browser!
Look for a icon on your desktop or start menu that looks similar to those on the right, then double click it. You can also click the icons here to get a new browser (they are links!).
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| Click to see Internet Explorer |
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| Click to see Chrome |
Browsers almost always have the following buttons:
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| Basic navigation |
Home - Goes to your home page, the first page you see, prevents getting lost.
Stop - Stops what the browser is doing, prevents loading stuff you don't need.
Back - Goes back one page
Forward - Goes forward one page.
These are what you will use the most, of course there are other buttons but we don't need them yet.
Step 1:
Find your browser by looking for one of the icons like above. Start the program by double clicking on it.
Step 2:
Locate the address bar, it will probably already have an address in it or be a long white box.
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| An address bar |
This is what you can use to navigate places and also automatically changes every time you load a web page to show you its address. Handy if you want to write it down and come back later!
Click on it once and press delete or backspace until it is empty (backspace is a long key with an arrow).
Step 3:
Type in: www.google.co.uk
Press the enter key (normally larger than the rest and with a down and left arrow icon, underneath backspace).
Step 4:
Now the browser will try and load the website that the address points to. After a few seconds you should see a logo similar to this one:
If you don't, thats alight. Google has a habit of drawing things on their logo for fun. You know your in the right place if its got a search bar under it. Take a look as what I see when I type that address in today:
Step 5:
You are now finished interacting with the browsers controls, we are going to use the actual website now.
Click on the white box underneath the Google logo. Type in: weather in England
You might have to click the little magnifying glass on the right there to make it search, However sometimes depending on the settings it may just start looking while your typing. Either way you will see a list of results that match what you typed in like this:
Google is the worlds favourite search website. The way it finds stuff is a little complex, so I like to explain it as: "Google finds what is the most popular answer to what you typed in".
Step 6:
We are going to go to the first result on the list, which at the time of writing was "BBC Weather London".
Click on the blue link (Remember those?) and it will take you to that website.
Step 7:
Now you should see the BBC weather website's webpage for London. Like below:
No rain tonight!
Well done! You have just got online, used a search engine and checked the weather on a website! You are now an internet user!
It doesn't stop there, anything you can think of to type into search engines, any addresses you see in real life, you can think "I'll type that in an have a look later". You have taken the first step on a long road.
Of course, there is a lot more you need to know about this area, but there is no way I can cover it in one tutorial. You may have noticed it took me a good long time since my last post to decide what to include in this one. So we will come back and look at the internet again after we finish our tour of the basics.
Next post: More Basic Internet Browser controls and tricks
Still staying with basic internet tools, we will look a bit more into how to use a browser and some of the other functions it offers. We need to get you good at this so we can try other stuff!
I'll cover things like why you cant just switch a computer off at the wall and what you should be doing. Don't worry if you have been doing this, its not the end of the world.
Extra reading:
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