Report Three: How Does the Web Operate?

Finding Cousin Harry

Imagine this, one afternoon you are sitting at your computer and decide to look for your old cousin Harry in Colorado, you know he has a Web page because last Christmas he kept bugging you to visit him. However, the problem is you have no clue wher e to begin. There are millions of address' on the Internet and it is impossible to go through each one to find Cousin Harry. What do you do? Use your search engine. A search engine is the phone book for the Internet. You could call it the Cyber-yellow pages. It only takes a second for the search engine to sift through the millions of addresses to find the one you are looking for. Isn't this a nice tool to have. Once you have the address, type it in the appropriate box and voila your computer tak es you there. All of a sudden you are looking at a picture of your Cousin Harry and reading up on his resume.

Information Superhighway

All of this sounds too easy right? Well, it is. The Internet is set up like a mega-highway which has on-ramps and off-ramps, street signs, as well as traffic lights to guide you through efficiently and effectively. Your computer is your car and effor tlessly takes you on a trip anywhere you want. The links are the highway which travel on the roadways of the Web. However, unlike an actual highway the road you travel on is endless and you can end up in millions of different places. The best part about traveling on the superhighway is you don't have to fill up every two-hundred miles.

Link me up Scotty...

Links are like instant transporters. They take you from one place to another with a click of a mouse. Each link on the Web has an URL address (Uniform Resource Locator) which gives the computer information to locate a site. The URL is extremely imp ortant because without it you wouldn't be able "link" to the site, especially if you got the wrong one. The URL is like any address you get, if it's wrong, you could end up in a dark deserted alley filled with rats or sitting comfortably on Cousin Harry's couch with a cup of cappuccino.

Some people like to incorporate relative links on their homepages. Others don't even bother. I think there should be a balance between the two, not too much and not too little. If you have links on your page it should be grouped in an organized manner such as by subjects. A link to Magic Johnson next to a link to Chopin is a no-no, unless you're grouping links by... great men?

Another organizational clue for links should be how relative are they. Do you really need a link to Magic Johnson if you are writing about music from the Romantic period? I don't think so. The opposite is true as well, if you are writing about German Ope ras, it is nice to provide a link to some sites which talk about German Operas. Always remember the rule, not too much, and not too little.

The following sites I found while riding along the Superhighway one day.
This first site was extremely disorganized and turned me off right away. It was a site that took forever to download, and was difficult to find where the links were. Too much! When you click on to This site was unorganized as well. Too little! The answer to that question is because it was absolutely boring!!! There was no pizzazz to it.

Let me describe it to you. When you first click on this site, you see a yellow screen that half blinds you. After you recover from this shock you continue to read the contents. These contents includes some information on the person's present research. Whoopee. This is a whopping one paragraph.

As you scroll down the short page, you come across a link entitled "personal". You click on this hoping to find out some dirty laundry on this guy. However, you are extremely disappointed because it contains nothing more than a short list (four items) of what this person likes.

You think to yourself, if this it, I should e-mail this poor guy and tell him what I think. Unfortunately by the time you get back to the blinding yellow home page, you find out there is no link to his email account. What!? I can't believe it. Does this guy expect me to open up my UNIX account, memorize his address and go through all that trouble? I don't think so! Perhaps this is his plan. Knowing how lazy people are, he purposely didn't provide this link because he knew he wouldn't like what he got. Smart guy.

. These next two sites are straightforward and easy to browse through. You don't need to worry about getting lost because they provide links to take you back to where you came from. The pages don't take long to download and the set up is pleasant to look at. No blinding backgrounds here.

1. CNN interactive
2. Elle Magazine

Go back to my home Page

Half way there, onward to Report four