Home Pages

The home page is normally the first thing that you see when you first access a site. The home page provides an introduction to the site, with hypertext links to all the other pages of the site, and possibly to other sites also.

KEY POINT - The home page is designed to help users to move around the site. Links can be recognised easily on a page. In text, they are usually a different colour from the rest of the text, and they are often underlined. Pictures and icons can also be links and these can be spotted by moving the cursor over them. The cursor is normally an arrow, but it changes to a hand with a pointing finger when it moves over a link.

If a user wants to visit certain sites on a regular basis, the browser can bookmark the URLs of these sites so that they can be accessed quickly without having to type in the address. A user can start on any WWW page in any site and follow links leading to other pages in other sites. This type of exploration, or browsing, of the World Wide Web is called surfing.