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Emails, URLs, Domains... huh?

I often get asked "What's the difference?"

To those of you who have been on the web for some time, this will sound pretty dumb but we were all newbies once.

This can be a bit confusing at first. Hopefully by now you get the basic difference between an email address (which you can just send emails to) and a URL or website address (which you can look at on the internet). An email address always has an @ symbol in it, and isn't case sensitive. A URL, on the other hand, can look like a lot of things. They usually start with http://, but as a browser will tack that on itself, often people don't write it as part of their web address. These are all URLs:

http://members.arach.net/~retrokat
http://www.kattyb.com
http://retrokat.com

If a server is set up properly, you don't have to have www in the address. A domain is considered the professional thing for a business, and once you have paid for a domain name you can also usually use it for email addresses, eg kat@mydomain.com.

The address of the website - ie, what you type into the browser, may or may not be an indication of where your actual site is, such as .com.au is in Australia, and .co.uk is in the United Kingdom - although if you want to get technical, only an IP address is really a "real" address - they just look like a bunch of numbers.