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Are you a new Internet user? If so, relax.
| Don't fret! You can get around easily by clicking
your mouse and using your keyboard. If you aren't comfortable with the
mouse and keyboard, your Club offers a class especially designed for you.
It is appropriately named: Mouse and Keyboard. Links. You will notice the name of the class
at the end of the previous paragraph has a different
look than this text. That is because it is a text "link." A link causes your
browser to take different actions. The web master has set up the class
name link to open a small browser window that will provide a description
of the class. Another example of a text link is a link to another portion
of a page. To drop down to the heading "The Internet Influence"
click here. On most web pages, once you click on
a text link, it will change color slightly.
Images may also be links. Examples on this page are; the blue buttons
at the top, and the blue button at left with the word "Home" in it.
Clicking on it will replace this page with the Home page of this site.
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 Do
you play favorites? When using the Internet, playing favorites is not
only an acceptable practice, it is also encouraged. Once you get to a site
or page that you like, bookmark it. This will save you the trouble of
finding the address every time.
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 The
next time that you want to visit a site or page that you have bookmarked,
just click on the Favorites or Bookmark and select the name of the site
that you want to visit. The image at the right shows the user selecting
the Computer Club's site, when the user clicks on the sites name, the
browser will automatically take you to the site. |
| Getting around. Most sites will have the contents organized by topic.
On this site, there are several topics that appear in the blue buttons at
the top of the page. When you click on one of these buttons (links), your browser
will automatically open a page that addresses the topic presented in the
button. When blue buttons appear at the left of the page, these topics
further develop the topic presented on the current page, or to the Home
page. This site also includes a page where you may search for the site
content by keywords or phrases. The Navigation chart below shows only a
portion of this site. The blue box represents this page that you are
reading. The one above with the image of a little house is the Home page. |
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Search: Another way to find your way around the Internet is to
search by keyword of phrase. Sites compete to draw you to their search
"engines." They earn money through advertisements on their sites.
You may have already heard of many of the popular ones. They have both a
simple keyword search and an "Advance Search" where you can specify
additional search arguments. Your Club has a very sophisticated search
page that only searches the contents of this site. Try it by clicking
this link.
Click on any one of these text links to visit a site to search the web.
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Many of you will use the Internet to find health information. The
Pew Charitable Trusts
fund a project to track our Internet behavior. A portion of the summary
contained in their July 16, 2003 Finding states:
Fully 80% of adult Internet users, or about 93 million Americans,
have searched for at least one of 16 major health topics online. This
makes the act of looking for health or medical information one of the
most popular activities online, after email (93%) and researching a
product or service before buying it (83%).
To read the full report,
click here.
In finding health information, you may choose to search on a topic like
"senior health care." But Whoa! Hundreds of thousands of web pages
contain combinations of those words! It's is not going to be clear how
useful the results are to your question. Nor is it going to provide
concept of how reliable the information is. You can generally tell the
source of the data by the ending on the web address. This is called a
domain. The domain is the .org that you see in the address of this
web page. Examples of other common domains include:
 | .com = commercial site, for example
www.moderncabinetmaking.com
= A book promotional site. |
| .org = a non-profit organization, examples:
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| .edu = an educational institution, for example
www.umich.edu = The University of
Michigan |
| .gov = a unit of the federal government, for example
www.medicare.gov = the Official
Medicare site. Note our own State of Nevada also uses the .gov domain:
www.nv.gov = official State of Nevada
web site. |
| .state = a state government site, for example
www.state.ny.us = New York
State's web site. Note the further defining ".us" to |
| .co = county government site, for example
www.co.clark.nv.us/ =
Clark County, Nevada's home page. Note the further defining ".nv.us"
for Nevada, United States. |
| .net = a general reference to companies that are involved in the
Internet, for example
www.earthlink.net = Earthlink, and Internet provider. |
There are dozens of exceptions to the above generalities. There is a whole
raft of foreign based web sites where one will find, .uk = United Kingdom,
.ru = Russia, .ca = Canada, .au = Australia, etc.
Once you've a web site that you are may be interested in, pay attention
to the information presented, especially on a commercial site. Keep in
mind that health care information on the Internet is not professional
medical advice, and it should not be used as a substitute for a visit with
your health care provider. |
"Free" isn't without cost
Offers of products or services by any business, generally isn't. Read
the fine print. They want you to visit their place of business to spend
money!
However on the Internet, "free" takes on an entirely different aspect. Watch
out! Spyware and other malware programs usually get downloaded to your
computer when you download free items.
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