On the Internet I also have two addresses: an email address of donsingleton@cox.net and a web page address of http://tulsahightech.com. Actually I have several other email addresses, and several other web page addresses, but for now let us focus on these two addresses. To communicate with me the “communication device” you use is an email program. I use Outlook Express, but others use Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, or others.
The screen looks like this:
and to send an email I click “Create Mail”, and get:
As you can see it knows the email is from me. I fill in the To: field with the address of the person I want to send the email to. If I want to send it to two or more people, I separate their email addresses with a semi-colon (“;”). I cans put other addresses on the CC line, and I can put some on the BCC line. The people seeing the message will see the addresses I put on the TO line and the CC line, but not the addresses on the BCC line. I should also assign a subject for the email.
If you want to use my other address you need a “transportation device” called a Web Browser which you use to go around the Internet “surfing” the web. I use Firefox, but many use Internet Explorer, and some use Opera, Safari, or other browsers.
I put my web address in the location bar for my browser and press enter, and it takes me to that address, just as a car would take me to some street address.
The communication with a web page is pretty much one way. You read what I wrote, but you don’t have an ability to express your thoughts to me, unless the web page is a blog, which is a bit advanced for this beginner discussion (we may cover blogging in a future article).
Let us take a closer look at those two web addresses: the email address is donsingleton@cox.net. Starting at the end, email addresses for people in United States will end with “.com” (generally a commercial business, but not necessarily), “.org” (generally a non-profit organization), “.net” (generally an Internet Service Provider, or ISP), “.edu” (generally an educational organization), “.gov” (government), or “.us”. Cox is my Internet Service Provider (as well as my cable Internet provider, and they would love my phone business as well). They use cox.com for their own website, and cox.net for their customer’s email addresses. They actually provide me with a free web page at http://members.cox.net/donsingleton, but I don’t currently use it.
The “cox.net” is collectively called the “domain name”. An email address has three parts: the name of the person (donsingleton), an “at” sign (@) showing it is an email address, and the domain name (cox.net). I was the first person named donsingleton that wanted that email address from cox, so I got it. If another Don Singleton wanted an email address from cox he might have to be donsingleton2, or don1357, or donjsingleton.
Now let us look at the web address http://tulsahightech.com. My domain tulsahightech is a “.com” domain. I actually own tulsahightech.org and tulsahightech.net, but so far I am not using those domains. The “http://” just identifies it as a web address. You can also use http://www.tulsahightech.com as well, but the “www.” is not required, at least for my website, and also most (but not all) web addresses.
Some people use Hotmail, Yahoo, Google (Gmail), or other such companies to do email, rather than their ISP, so they will use a Web Browser (the “transportation device”) to travel to a site to send and receive email.