Going to Specific Web Addresses

Now that you know the basic parts of a web address, you can go to specific sites! To do this, you can type in web addresses in your browser's Address Bar. If you remember from the Web Browsers section of this tutorial, the Address Bar is white and is located underneath the Navigation Bar. It looks something like this:

To type in the Address Bar, use your left mouse button and click once in the white space. This should highlight all of the information in the Address Bar in blue. When the entire line is highlighted, hit the Backspace key on your keyboard to erase the line. If you cannot highlight the information, click with your left mouse button to the right of the last letter or symbol in the address bar and use the Backspace key to manually erase the line.

When the line is clear, there should be a blinking cursor in the Address Bar. The cursor is just a black vertial line. This means that you can type in your web address. If you wanted to go to Yahoo!, for instance, you would type in www.yahoo.com (Remember, you don't need to manually type the http://. Your browser will add that for you).

When you have typed in the entire address for the web page you want to visit, use your left mouse button to click the Go button to the right of the address bar, or hit the Enter key on your keyboard.

Let's try it!

1. Open up a new window. (Forgot how? Click here for instructions)
2. Left click in the address bar and erase the address of the homepage
3. Type in www.cnn.com
4. Left click on Go or hit Enter on your keyboard
5. This should bring you to the main page of CNN's website
6. Don't exit this window entirely. Simply minimize it, because we'll be using it again later. (Forgot how to minimize? Simply use your left mouse button to click on the minus sign in the top right of your browser window.)