Introduction

There are many ways to specify a web address. Only one way is the correct and unambiguous way. All the rest have varying degrees of success in being found on the Internet.

Terms

A web page may be specified as http://www.derbyshireguide.co.uk:80/travel/bakewell.htm?q=town#bottom. The components of this web address are:

http://www.hcidata.com/index.htm

The unambiguous way to specify the home page of HCI Data is to use its Uniform Resource Locator (URL) (with the protocol to be used). The URL for the home page of HCI Data is http://www.hcidata.com/index.htm which is a unique on the world wide web. When the web page is fetched from the web server the protocol to be used needs to be specified. Normally this is http (HyperText Transmission Protocol) but other protocols include https (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure), ftp (File Transfer Protocol) and gopher. Putting this all together, the technically correct way to access a web page is to specify it as http://www.hcidata.com/index.htm but there are many shorter forms that can be used.

http://www.hcidata.com

www.hcidata.com is known as the host name. This is the unique name of the web server (host) computer.

On sites hosted by HCIDATA there is no need to include index.htm or /index.htm at the end of the URL as we set up web sites so that if only the host name is specified we will send the index.htm web page to the browser.

www.hcidata.com

Most browsers assume the the Hyper Text Transmission Protocol (HTTP) will be used, so it's usually safe to omit it.

hcidata.com

This is what is known as the domain name. For UK domains the domain name is hcidata.co.uk or hcidata.uk from June 2014. Domain names are the starting point for web sites, FTP sites, e-mail addresses and this is what is registered every 2 years. We set up our host systems so that a request for a web page is automatically re-routed to the www.domain-name. Try your domain name (without the www) and see how the browser shows a change of the address/location from domain-name to www.domain-name. Most search engines will find a domain name.

Names to Avoid

Some styles of name should be avoided. It is not recommended that the ".com" or ".co.uk" is left off of a web address.

www.hcidata will work on Internet Explorer as it will append '.com' at the end. If you only have a .co.uk and not the .com then specifying only part of the domain name will result in no web site being found or, worse still, another company's web pages.

Upper of Lower Case

Most web servers are case sensitive. The path name part of URL MUST be in the same case as the name of the file on the web server (host). This means that the following URLs refer to DIFFERENT web pages:

  www.hcidata.com/index.htm
  www.hcidata.com/INDEX.htm
  www.hcidata.com/index.HTM

However, the host name part of URL can be specified in either upper, lower or mixed case. The protocol can also be specified in upper, lower or mixed case. The following web addresses all refer to the same web page:

  http://WWW.HCIDATA.COM/index.htm
  HTTP://WWW.HCIDATA.COM/index.htm
  HTTP://www.hcidata.com/index.htm
  Http://www.HCIDATA.com/index.htm
  Http://Www.HCIData.Com/index.htm

Suggested Web Address From

Some ways to put the web address of a home page are:

  http://www.hcidata.com
  HTTP://www.hcidata.com
  Http://www.hcidata.com
  HTTP://WWW.HCIDATA.com
  http://www.HCIdata.com