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There should be no need to explain what a website is since you are looking at one right now but I will explain how you are viewing this website. You can think of the internet as a gigantic spider's web spanning almost the entire globe (hence the term world wide web). Just like in a spider's web with different types of silk the internet is held together with many different types of cables. There are normal telphone cables and then there are the heavy high speed cables which allow for faster movement on the internet. Your computer is like a fly on the web. You are connected to one line which it in turn connected to ever other line. Of coures these lines have to meet somewhere which is where ISP's come into play. There are several different levels of these. First you connect to a local ISP then from there a regional ISP. When you dial-up, or however else you connect to the internet, you gain access to the web and all the other computers on it. Now that you are connected you can retrieve data from any system serving it out over the web. To get to the system you want you must go to it's location or address. A computers address is different from the street addresses we refer to but does the same thing (tells the location of the computer). An example of an ip address would be 64.83.129.14, this address would take you to the system with that address. Every site has an ip address and this is how you get to it. You are probably thinking "But when I go to google I do not type in a weird number I type www.google.com." This would be what is called a domain name. Since ip address are such hard things to remember domain names were developed. When someone registers a domain name they give an ip address for that domain name to refer to. When you type in this domain name you are taken to the ip address it refers to. This is how you are connected to the web and how you are able to access information from all over the world. |