Please take a moment to go over these pages on navigation. They may be rudimentary for those who have plenty of Internet experience, but some of the information is specific to this educational module.
Maneuvering through the web is not as difficult as it may seem. There are standards to which most Web Masters adhere to that will help make sense of it all.
By its simplest definition, the Web is merely a collection of web pages that are connected by "hyperlinks". A hyperlink is a shortcut, also known as a hot spot, or a button that will take you to a specified page. Hyperlinks make navigation on the web much simpler than typing in an address every time you want to travel to another page.
Hyperlinks can be either text or graphics.
- Text. The standard visual cue for "hypertext" is blue and underlined. Although this is the standard, hypertext can be any color. If you click on the hypertext it will take you to another site or web page. Go ahead, give it a try. Click once on the hypertext you just read.
- Graphics. The World Wide Web would be a pretty boring place if there were nothing to see but text. Adding graphics to a web site can make the page much more visually stimulating, entertaining and instructive. But graphics can also function as hyperlinks. This graphic is a hyperlink.
Click on the juggler to see what happens.
It's relatively easy to see the difference between hypertext and regular text but graphics are a bit more difficult. ANY graphic on a page can be a hyperlink. So, how do you know which graphics are hyperlinks?
Whenever you run your mouse pointer over a hyperlink the pointer will change--usually from an arrow to a hand. This indicates that the graphic or text is an active link. Run your mouse over the following graphics and text to see which are linked and which are not:
If, at any time, you happen to get lost while jumping from page to page (surfing), most Browsers have a "back" button that will retrace your steps for you. Using the "back" button, you can usually get back to where you started.