Sharing Your Website
Let’s talk about web addresses and how to share your website on social media and other venues.
When I was a kid and the teacher asked me to write my name on my paper, in the margin, I didn’t just write Katie Ayres, I wrote “Katie Ayres, 3rd row, 4th seat, Room #9, Oakwood School, Santa Clara, California, USA, Earth, Solar System, and Milky Way.
I liked the idea, that if an alien on the other side of the universe had this address, they could find me that day, sitting at my desk.
Web addresses work the same way. For a page on your website, there is one unique address that will retrieve that one page. No matter where someone is in the world, if they type in a particular web address, they will see the same web page every time.
If I type in the domain 1happyplace.com, you will see the home page of my website. If we go to the about page, you will see 1happyplace.com/about.
A web address has two parts:
- Domain
- Path
The domain represents the slice of the Internet that you own. When you set up hosting, you gave your website a home and that hosting company provides the directory in which your website lives. Then, the path portion of the address, points to a place inside that directory of files.
In the Videos section of 1 Happy Place, there is a video “Can I go to the Internet”, and the web address is 1happyplace.com/video-library/can-i-go-to-the-internet
This allows for organization and roughly matches the way you might organize a directory of files on your computer. The directory is video-library and the file is can-i-go-to-the-internet. This doesn’t have to match the files on the server, but in this case, it does.
So what about the https:// part of the web address. That has to do with history and the protocols used for your computer or phone to connect with my server that holds 1happyplace. Just know that it will always be https:// and some applications like Facebook might show it or might not.
To share your website, you can type the address manually, such as 1happyplace.com/about.
But you can also open up the page in a browser such as Chrome or Edge. Along the top, you will see the web address. Select the entire address and copy and paste it where you are sharing it. That is guaranteed to work. If you cut and paste, you get the whole address and it will work properly.
I hope this has helped you better understand how to share links to your website which encourages more traffic.
Be sure to share your website whenever you get the chance!
A few more facts about web addresses
- The https:// protocol might be http:// – which means the link between you and the website is not secure. Watch Securing Your Website to find out more
- Web addresses can end with a query mark “?” with additional text – this can be extra information for the website to process, such as a search string “?s=hello”
- Web addresses can also end with a “#” and additional text, this is a link into a particular section of the web page
Find out more on Mozilla: What is a URL?