Anatomy of A Website Address

The first time you typed in a website address into your browser it may have been a bit daunting. A website address is also known as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and has a few major parts.

Sample URL: http://www.solidhouse.com/howthingswork/urls.htm

http://	Short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and is the only protocol used for viewing websites currently. You may see an “s” added on such as https:// which indicates that site is encrypted to protect any information you exchange with the website.
www.	Short for world wide web and was a convention started to indicate that you were visiting a website. It is not necessary to prefix names with www (if the server that hosts the website was configured properly). The example domain could be accessed without the www. via http://solidhouse.com/howthingswork/urls.htm instead.
solidhouse.com	This is the domain name and is essential to finding the website. See our article about how DNS works for more information on how your computer turns the domain name into actually finding and accessing that server.
howthingswork/	This is a folder on the web server that contains related files.
urls.htm	This is the actual document on the server that contains the information you are reading. There are many different extensions on pages that you may see. Some like php,asp,aspx,pl,and cfm usually indicate that the page is being generated every time you visit by software on the server (this may be done to show you dynamic content on the page like upcoming events or new photos). The other two extensions that are common are .htm and .html which indicate that it is a plain document with no dynamic content.