"Links" are more than just a type of sausage....
One of "W's" in "WWW" stands for Web, and the reason it's called a World Wide Web is because every web page has the ability to be connected to every other web page. Just like everyone on the Net has an E-Mail address; every page on the Net has a web address. One "trick" in telling which is which is the "at" sign - "@" - which almost always indicates an e-mail address. Web addresses are actually file names - they indicate the location of a web page.
Lets look at a web address in detail:
Here's one from our web site - http://www.mnrealty.com/community/bloom/index.htm. Now to break this up into parts you can understand, let's look at it from left to right...
http:// - The letters stand for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, and this part tells your "browser" that the address is a web page, versus other forms of internet communication. Fortunately, modern software is getting pretty good at not needing this any more - you can usually just start with "www..." or whatever the page is called. For marketing, do NOT include this on your cards, flyers, etc. since it is just more letters to either remember or get confused.
www.mnrealty.com - This is the "Domain Name," and it is registered with the Internet Gods (Actually a company called InterNIC) similar to a world wide "trademark." Once you've registered the name for about $100, you "own" it and can use it on any computer system capable of "hosting" domains. Your service provider will somehow charge you for this, in addition to the InterNIC registration fees.
Now the interesting thing about domain names is that they are only for the benefit of humans, the computers could care less. Try this: Instead of typing in "www.mnrealty.com" to find our home page, try typing in "MNRealty.com" - voila, same page! In actuality, the "IP address" (the number) is programmed into the system to represent the exact location of your service provider, and also the location of your main page on their system. The "www.mnrealty.com" is set up 'cause people don't like to remember numbers, and it doesn't have the same marketing "zip". So the net gurus created what's called DNS (Domain Name Servers) that do nothing except cross-reference the numbers to the names - just for us stupid humans...
/community/bloom - Most web sites have more than one page, so a way is needed to "address" the other pages on your site. The bigger the site, the more files, the more organization is needed to keep track of all the files or pages. Each "forward slash" indicates a sub-directory, or sub-folder that is just like the directory or folder structure on your own hard drives. I often advise people to look at this as the "outlines" we used to make in grade school: remember you started with Roman numeral I, then big letter A, then number 1, etc. Each time, the outline would "indent," meaning that each of these categories belonged to the larger item above it. Hard drives are the same way. Our main page is "www.mnrealty.com." Then we subdivided our pages and put all of the community information in a sub-folder called /community. Under that, we categorized all the communities into their own folders (/bloom is for Bloomington.)
/index.htm - finally, at the end of the chain, is the actual web page. "Index" is fairly standardized to mean the main page for that folder or directory. ".htm" is called the file "extension," and this tells your computer that it is written in the format of a web page (vs. a spreadsheet or a photo file) HTM or HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and it means that the file is written in "web-ese."
So now you know what all those slashes and dots mean.... don't worry, there won't be a test. In fact, you can forget most of this if you get the idea that before one page can be "linked" to another, you have to first know the address you want to link up with.