Internet Basics
We are all familiar with the internet as users - if you are here, reading this page, you obviously know how to open an internet browser and browse around, visiting websites.
Just as we can all make a phone call without needing to know how the phone system operates, we can all look at websites without needing to know how the internet works.
If you want to start a business on the internet, though, you will need to know a little bit more than the average internet user, because you will need to build websites, rather than just look at them.
This page is a complete beginner's guide to moving from internet user to website publisher. Of course, we can't instantly teach you all the skills you will need in just a few minutes, but we can give you an idea of how everything fits together, and which skills you need to learn first.
Read through the descriptions, then click on the links to watch the short videos.
One thing we can tell you right away - you don't need to become a programmer or a techie to earn good money from an internet business. There are many great tools and services around these days which take all the technical headaches away and do it all for you.
So grab a cup of tea or a cool drink, relax, and cruise your way through The Internet Basics ...
What You Need To Know To Get Started On The Internet
1. What is the internet and how does it work?
The internet began as a way for academics to send messages to one another, even when they were on different campuses. Someone came up with the idea that you could send mail electronically, instead of printing things out and posting them. Since the big universities had started connecting their computers together to transfer research data, it was easy to send the electronic mail (e-mail) along the same connections.
Government departments began hooking their computers to the university network, and as big corporations started using computers, they, too, connected to the university network. In the 1980s, with the explosion of personal computers, small businesses and households started using email, too.
At this time, there was a parallel development happening - researchers were working on sharing documents across the internet, as well as sending messages. In 1989, project was proposed to develop a standardised method for transferring and displaying documents across the internet. This project was called the World Wide Web (W3) project. (Thich is why so many website addresses begin with "www".)
Today, the internet consists of millions of computers, called servers, which are connected together and are always on, constantly sending and receiving information. These servers hold (host) the documents which make up websites, and the information which makes up emails.
There are companies called Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which connect the internet servers to the computers belonging to individuals and companies. You send and receive emails, and download webpages, through your ISP.
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2. What is a website?
Each page of a web site is a document. The document is written in one of the languages designed for web page documents - often, but not always, this language is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).
The files which are pages of a web site are grouped together in directories, just the same way as files on your computer are grouped together. The name of any website page is simply the path through the directories to where the file is located. For example, this page is called "http://chrisandjennyford.com/internetbasics/index.html". This means that the file for this page is located at chrisandjennyford.com, in the directory "internetbasics", and it is called "index.html", which means it is written in HTML.
The path to the file for a web page is called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Every web page has a unique URL. If your computer follows a path is has been given, and can't find the web page file where it is supposed to be, you will see a "Page Not Found" error message, sometimes called a 404 error message.
The first part of the URL, "http://" means "hyper text transfer protocol", and refers to the method the computer is going to use to transfer the file. Most URLs start with "http://", but occasionally you will see "https://". This is a secure version of the standard hypertext transfer protocol, and it is used on web pages which require you to be logged in, or which are going to transfer financial information.
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3. How does my computer find websites?
When you type or paste the name of a website into your browser, or click on a link, your computer goes to find the web page.
The directories and files for each website are stored (hosted) on servers, and the location of the server for each website is a string of numbers whose meaning is defined by something called Internet Protocol - in other words, each computer has an IP address.
Your computer asks a special server (called a name server) for the IP address of the host for that domain. You can think of a name server as being an internet phone book - you tell it the name, and it gives you the number. Once your computer gets the IP address, it sends a request to the host server for the file of the web page you have selected.
The host sends the file to your computer, and your computer displays it on the screen.
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4. How does my computer find out what to display on the screen when I visit a website?
When you visit a web page, your computer requests a file from the host server. The file contains a description of the page in one of the languages used to describe web page layouts.
Most commonly, a web page will be described in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). "Hypertext" is a term created in the 80s to refer to clickable links which took you to another page. Hypertext was originally developed to help people navigate through databases of documents which were all on one computer, but it was quickly adapted for use on web pages.
HTML uses "tags" around text and objects on the page to describe how they are to be displayed. A tag appears inside angle brackets <>. For example, a <b> tag would indicate that the following text was to be displayed in bold. A </b> tag would indicate the end of the bold text.
If text is to be a link, then the "anchor text" - the text that is clickable - would be enclosed in <a> tags. Inside the first set of brackets with the "a" would be the URL to which the link points.
There are many, many different tags which have been developed, and complexities like style sheets and templates, but the basic principle of HTML - text enclosed in tags - remains unchanged.
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5. What is HTML and how much of it do I need to know?
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is the language which describes to your computer how to display the pages of websites.
You don't need to know all about HTML to make money in the internet, but it is handy to know a little bit.
The most important HTML for any internet business is the link tags. A link looks like this:
<a href="http://domain.com/folder/page.html">Anchor Text</a>
The first "a" means that this is a link, and the "href=" says "the following URL is where to point the link". The text between the tags is called the "anchor text", and the /a indicates the end of the anchor text.
You will notice that in HTML, the end tag is always the same letter as the beginning tag, but with / in front of the letter.
When you want to attract visitors to your website, it is very important to create as many links as possible which point back to your site, using carefully-chosen words as the anchor text. In some places, they have helpful editors which allow you to highlight your anchor text, click the "link" button, and paste in the URL. Wordpress blogs work this way, for example.
In other places, such as article directories and Squidoo, you need to type the link formatting yourself in order to make links.
Other useful HTML tags are:
<b>bold</b>
<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Heading 2<h2> (usually there are 4-6 levels of heading defined in a style sheet)
<p>paragraph</p>
<br>break - new line (this is the one type of tag that doesn't come in pairs)
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6. How do I put up my own website?
If you want to have a website of your own, you will need somewhere to host the site, and a domain name that people can use to find your site.
Once you have registered a domain name and organised a hosting service, you tell the name servers where to find your new domain, and you send your website files across the internet to the host server.
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7. How do I get a domain name?
You need to go to a specialised domain name registry site to register a domain name.
Many hosting sites have a domain name registry site available as part of their hosting service, but there are also site which simply register domains for you and don't provide hosting.
Some people believe that it is a good idea to register your domain names somewhere else, even if your hosting service offers a registry service, because if anything ever happens to your hosting company, you can instantly point your domain names somewhere else and start trading again immediately.
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8. How do I get someone to host my website?
There are many website hosting companies. Some are "no frills", and will allow you to host as many domains and web sites as you wish for $10 a month or less. Others are "full service", and include website editors to help you make your pages, autoresponders to collect email addresses from your visitors and send them emails, and even shopping carts to allow you to sell things on your websites. These ones typically cost something like $30 per month for each website.
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9. How do I get the files for my website to the host server?
Once you have created the pages for your website, you will transfer the files to the correct folder on the server using File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
You can buy FTP software, but there are free FTP programs which are just as easy to use. Filezilla is free to download. Click here to download Filezilla.
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10. How do I create files for my website?
When it comes to creating your website pages, you have many options. The "full service" hosting services have built-in editors, which make the pages for you. Creating a page that way is as easy as making a page using a word processor.
You can also get software which will make complete websites for you - you write the words for the pages in a text editor like Notepad, and tell it the keywords your site is about. The software does all the work of creating the individual pages, the structure of the site, links between pages, a sitemap, and even places for advertising on the pages.
If you are more technically-minded, you can get an HTML editor program for your PC and create the website pages yourself. Alternatively, you can pay someone else to do it for you.
It is more important that you learn WHAT to put on your web pages than that you learn how to create the files. Once you know what you need, there are many ways to get it. If you don't know what you need in the first place, then, you can waste a lot of time learning programming tricks that don't make you a penny.
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11. What is .php?
PHP (originally known as Personal Home Page) is a language which describes web pages, like HTML, but it is specialised for web pages which have variable content of some kind.
PHP scripts pass information between web pages to tell your computer which versions of the page, or elements on the page, should be displayed this time.
You will generally not be required to know any PHP to start making money on the internet.
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