Domain Names – Clear.Design

URL

A URL refers to the address of the webpage you’re on. It stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but you don’t need to know that. What you do need to know is that a URL tells your browser where to request a webpage. URLs are composed of several parts, broken up by periods or slashes. For example, the URL for this webpage is:

https://clear.design/learn/url/

We’ll cover the beginning of the URL, the https://, another time. Let’s start with the Domain Name in the middle of it – clear.design. This part of the URL lets your browser zero in on the computer that is home to a particular website. The next part, /learn/, is telling that computer what folder to look in for the webpage you requested. If there were no more instructions after this, it would automatically request the index file from that folder. But there is another instruction – /url/! So the computer looks for the url folder inside of the learn folder. Now, there are no more instructions, so the computer requests the index file from the url folder, and you see this webpage.

This means that when you type in a domain name on its own with nothing else after it, you’re requesting the very first index file from that website. This part of the file name is often left implied by the web browser, and not explicitly shown.

There is much more to learn about URLs, but I’ll leave that for another time. For now, understanding how they communicate the address of a webpage is the most important part.

Domain names are extremely important to the functionality of the internet. If you’re using the internet, you’ve used domain names. Every website is being served to you from another computer somewhere else. When connected to the internet, that computer is given a unique number to identify it. Typically, that looks like ###.###.###.### (ie, 192.168.0.256), though that is slowly changing to a new format. These numbers are called IP Addresses.

Those numbered addresses are impractical to remember, so we use Domain Names instead. The domain name for this website is clear.design. Domain names simply point to an IP Address, and make it easier to read or remember the address of a website. When you type the name of a website (google.com), you’re typing a domain name.

At the risk of oversimplifying things a bit, there are gigantic lists of domain names and their corresponding IP addresses kept by major internet providers throughout the world. When a person types a domain name into their web browser, it checks that list to see what the IP address is, and then connects to it.

Domain names are not necessary to use the internet! You can actually connect to websites directly using an IP address! But it’s much harder to keep track of which website is which if you’re only connecting to an IP address, so we mostly use Domain Names.