Getting ONLINE
Pitchcare Online, for those who are Offline
HELLO again, welcome to the fourth instalment in my series of articles for getting online. In previous issues I’ve described how to get a computer and how to get connected to the internet. I expect you’re now at a point where you have this hulk of metal sitting in a corner with a shiny screen attached, a little white lead connecting it to your phone line. You’re on ‘the internet’. Congratulations! But how do you achieve anything with it? That's where this article comes in, a quick look at how to use your web browser. It applies if you are using your home PC, borrowing a friend's PC or using an internet café or library PC. First, lets get a handle on
some terminology that you need to know for your online time. One of the most used parts of the Internet is the World Wide Web, commonly shortened to ‘the web.’ The web is made up of pages of information with each page usually having links to other pages. Webpages are grouped together as websites and each webpage has a unique identifier called a web address (you may also see it referred to as a URL or a URI). Web browsing (also called
surfing) is the process of looking at webpages on websites, for example rugby results on the BBC Sport website or your bank account balance on your bank’s website. You do this with a piece of software, a web browser, commonly shortened to ‘browser.’ Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera are the most common web browsers. I’m going to assume that you are using Internet Explorer for the
rest of this article. This often comes with new computers and whilst there are much better alternatives available, all browsers have the same basic functionality. Once you have opened the
browser, you may be automatically directed to a website, or a blank page, depending on how the software is configured. There are lots of settings in the software so that things may not appear exactly as I describe, but there should be an address bar at the top with a ‘Go’ button beside it, and there should be back, forward, refresh and stop buttons. The address bar may be empty or if a website was automatically loaded, may contain a web address. When you want to visit a website and know its web address, this is where you type it in. For example, type in
http://www.pitchcare.com or
www.pitchcare.com and press enter or return on your keyboard, or click on the ‘Go’ button. This then loads the Pitchcare website. The http:// is usually not required, so you can save some time by not typing it in when you have to type web addresses in. On Pitchcare, links to other
webpages are usually in green and underlined. If you click on a link, the computer will open the new webpage and the display will change to show the new page. If you look in the address bar, the text will have changed to reflect the new page that you are looking at. If you ever want to tell someone else how to get to a webpage that you are looking at, copying that web address and sending it to them will provide what they need. When you have viewed
several webpages, following links from each one to the next, you may find yourself on a page that has no further links, or you perhaps need a piece of information that was contained on a page that you viewed a few minutes ago. In either case, you need to use the ‘back’ button. This button takes you to the previous entry on your browsing history. You can view your browsing history at any time by going to the ‘View’ menu, then ‘Explorer Bar’ and then ‘History.’ This shows a bar to the left of the screen showing each webpage you visited, and grouping them by the date you accessed them. You can click on an entry on the history bar to load that page at any time. The back and forward
buttons move you, unsurprisingly, back and forwards through your browsing history. You can only go forwards if you have already gone back. You can move more quickly backwards and forwards through several pages at once by using the little dropdown menus that are next to the back and forward buttons; each menu indicated by a downward pointing arrow. There are two other buttons visible on the browser that you will find of use at some point. They are ‘stop’ and ‘refresh’ (sometimes called reload). The stop button tells the browser to stop loading the current page, and just as descriptively, the refresh button refreshes the current page. If you have dialup internet access, and you come to a page that has many images on it, which would take a long time to load, you can stop the browser loading more
Part IV
by pressing the stop button. Sometimes information on a webpage updates frequently so you want to update the page to the latest version which is when you would use the refresh button. Do you remember that I mentioned a webpage might automatically load when you open the browser? That is called your homepage and you can set it to be anything you like. Simply browse the internet to get to the page you want to be your homepage. When it has loaded go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Internet Options.’ You should see a section called ‘Home page’ and three buttons underneath a text input box. Click the ‘Use Current’ button and you should see the address you typed into the address bar appear in this text input box. Click the ‘OK’ button at the bottom of the settings panel to save this page as your homepage. It will now automatically load the next time you open the browser. If you decide you might want
to visit a website again in the future, you could write the web address down on a piece of paper, then retype it back into the address bar when you want to revisit it. Nothing wrong with that, but the browser has a built in mechanism for storing these favourite webpages to make it a bit easier. It’s called ‘favorites’ (and sometimes called bookmarks). You can add a favorite for any page by going to the ‘Favorites’ menu and choosing ‘Add to favorites.’ A box pops up to allow you to customise the name of the favorite, and to choose a folder to store it in and click ‘OK.’ If you are organised you can have
“You can only go forwards if you have already gone back!”
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