The Internet for Beginners
The Internet is an information highway, helping to extend your knowledge - an experience that will become an integral part of your life. It’s like reading a book, except for the fact that you can use HYPERLINKS to go from one page to another and the size of the 'book ' runs into millions of pages!
To start using the Internet, you need to have the following:
- A computer with at least a P3 processor (computers six years old or younger).
- An Internet connection via an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or your telephone company. This can be a regular dial up connection (not so popular these days), ISDN, or Broadband (most popular).
- Software called Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla which are referred to as browsers. There are other browsers also available but these are the most popular ones. Microsoft Internet Explorer (known as IE) is built into Microsoft Windows.
- Additional accessories like a Webcam, microphone, and softwares such as MSN Instant Messenger, Skype etc are welcome but not necessary for you to get started.
This guide doesn’t cover how to get connected to the Internet. Your ISP will provide you with a guide on how to connect to the Internet.
Visiting a URL
It all really starts from the time you open the browser and start looking up various web sites. Web sites are online addresses which take you to various pages which contain information. One of the first web sites to start with is www.google.com . I am sure you have heard of this company in some way or the other. 'Googling' has even become a verb!
To visit Google, type www.google.com into the address bar and hit the enter key. You can type the URL of any site directly into the address bar if you know it. If you heard a URL on an ad or have it written on a brochure, for example, you can go there directly by typing it into the address bar and hitting enter.
TIP: URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator in technical terms or, a website address to you and me.
If you don’t know the full URL of a website, you can easily search for it.
Google allows you to search billions of indexed web pages for any topic you like. This is the moment when you discover 'keywords'. Keywords are words which define your search and are the backbone of the Internet. For example, If you are looking for courses in botany in United States, you would need to type in 'Botany courses US' in the search box featured on Google's main page.
There are many search tricks which you are likely to learn as you use search engines. Some of the popular search engines other than Google are:www.yahoo.com, www.msn.com and www.altavista.com.
I think I might have gone a bit fast here … let me explain some of the key functions of a browser. I will use general terms so that the information is relevant for any browser that you decide to use:
Back: Takes you the previous page
Forward: Takes you the page ahead (if you have already visited it)
Refresh: Refreshes the content of the page with new data, if it has been updated
Favorites: This is a book marking feature which allows you to save web site addresses which you like and might want to visit later. You can create topical folders and save the link names here.
The other items include History, which lets you see a list of web sites you have visited in the recent past and Search which is really useful when you have a long web page to go through and need to look up a specific term.
Tip: You can download a range of tool bars - small applications which sit on your web browser and allow quick access to a wide range of features, such as submitting a search on Google without even going to the Google home page.