Website Anatomy and Navigation

Businesses, government entities, and other organizations develop websites to sell products, provide services, or promote their activities. A website is a collection of web pages, each of which has a distinct purpose. One page may feature a product, another a contact form. A website’s pages are connected by links that enable a visitor to navigate the site easily. In this lesson, we’ll look at how websites are organized and how to recognize and use links.

URL Hierarchy

Websites have a home (main) page. It is the highest-level page. Examples are pbs.org or netflix.com. Other pages on the site are usually (but not always) named in a way that allows you to read and understand where you are on the website. Let’s take a closer look at Netflix as an example. Their home page is located at netflix.com. If you want to look at your Netflix account, you’ll find that at netflix.com/youraccount. The main home page for this course is oasisconnections.org. You’ll find a list of all of our courses at oasisconnections.org/all-courses. Want to contact us? That page is at oasisconnections.org/contact. A news organization may organize its web site as sitename/technologynews/articletitle. REI organizes products out in a logical sequence of name/category shown below. Also note the second circled area. This is called a breadcrumb and helps you as a shopper know exactly where you are within the website.

Subdomains

Another URL that you will encounter is that of the subdomain. A subdomain name comes before the main domain name. Support and help pages are often in a subdomain structure. An example is Apple’s website at apple.com. Their support pages are in a subdomain at support.apple.com. Subdomains are usually created for large areas of a website that are related to but not a part of the regular domain.