Lesson 2 - Web Browsing Basics

There are lots of things you can use the internet for, like looking up different recipes for chocolate cake or how to mend a broken fence. Almost anything you want to find or do on the web will be there – it's really like one absolutely massive encyclopaedia.

But there's so much more you can do with the internet besides finding out facts...

You can go shopping – you could buy a new computer, a washing machine, a car part, some exotic cloth, a pair of jeans in exactly the right size, colour, length and cut that they never seem to stock in your local branch of M&S, or you could do your weekly Tesco shop and have it delivered to your door... You can even sell things, too, on some buy and sell websites.

You can access various household services online. You can pay for your car tax, apply for a new passport, a blue badge or a school place. You can renew your TV licence. You can do online banking – transfer money to pay bills, move money between accounts, check your mortgage balance.

You can read the news, use social media, play online games, do a course (like this one!).

There are so many things you can do on the internet, I couldn't possibly list them all!

But in order to do all these things, you first need to know how to use a web browser – like Edge, which is the one built into Windows 11. You're probably already using Edge (or another browser) to do this course, so I'm aware that there's likely to be stuff in this lesson that you already know. But there might be features in Edge that you don't know about, or aren't yet confident with – so I'd still recommend following the whole of this lesson. Anything you already know, you can pat yourself on the back for already knowing, and when you get to something that's news to you, you can be glad you watched it all.

Click or tap on the video to get started, and I'll show you how to get the best out of the Edge web browser.

Web addresses and links

A web address is what you type into the address bar of your web browser to get to a website.  You have to type it exactly right – any mistakes will take you to the wrong website or will come up with an error message saying it can’t find the page.

Most web addresses start with www. – but not all do.  And some websites will work with or without the www. My advice is just to type in the address exactly as you’ve been given, and then you should be fine.

A bit about websites vs webpages...

Websites are made up of various webpages. For example, Helpful Books has a webSITE – www.helpfulbooks.co.uk – and that website is made up of various webPAGES, such as a page about what books we do, a page about how to sign up for the newsletter, etc. And each webpage has its own web address too, maybe something like this (which is the page all about our books) – www.helpfulbooks.co.uk/collections/all

The bit before the first / is the webSITE address – and if you just type that in, it takes you to the website's home page. But if you want to go directly to a particular webPAGE, you can type in the whole thing, including what's after the / .

So what are links?

Links are another way of getting to a particular webpage on a website, to save you typing in the address from scratch. You just type in the main website address and you can then click on links from there to get to different pages on that website.

You also get links that take you from one website to another. For example, a reference article webpage might have links to other websites that it used as sources for that article.

I think it's about time I showed you some of this in practice! This video is all about web addresses and links – click or tap to watch.

Practice: Open Edge, click or tap in the address bar and type helpfulbooks.co.uk – then hit the Enter key to go there. Then click or tap on the “Our Products” link at the top. Then click or tap on one of the book covers to read a bit more about it. Scroll down a bit and look at the “This book goes particularly well with...” section. Click or tap on one of those book covers to go to the webpage for it.

The Back, Forward and Refresh buttons

At the top of the browser window, there are some special buttons I want to show you.  These are the ones – up in the top left corner of the browser window:

The arrow buttons are the “Back” and “Forward” buttons. The one pointing left is “Back”, the one pointing right is “Forward”.

The way these work is that if you click on a link that takes you from one webpage to another, you can click or tap on the Back button to get back to the previous page. Click on the Forward button (which will only appear after you've used the Back button) and you’ll go to the new page again. It’s very handy if you click on a link by mistake and want to get back to the original page – or if you want to compare something on two different web pages, you can toggle between them by going back and forward between the two pages. (Mind you, for comparing websites, I’d say “Tabs” would be more useful, and I’ll cover those later in this lesson.)

The next button along, the curved arrow, means “Refresh”. Sometimes webpages don’t quite load properly, and you get blank squares where pictures ought to be, or the text has all gone a bit weird. If so, you can click or tap on Refresh and it’ll reload the webpage for you.

You might have another button at the top of your browser, a bit like this:

This is the “Home” button. It'll take you from whichever webpage you’re on, to your “Home” webpage. Your Home page is the webpage that usually opens when you open Edge, or when you open a new tab (unless you have yours set up to remember the last page you were on). Don't worry if you don't have this button - it's not there by default, but we'll show you how you can add it if you want to later in the course.

By default the Home page will probably be the Microsoft "start" page, which has a search box and lots of links to current news articles – but you can set it up to be something else if you like (e.g. I have the one on my work computer set to the Google search page).

This will make more sense when you see them all in action, so click or tap this video to see how they work, and learn a few nifty tricks with them too.

Practice 1 – Back and Forward: If you've still got the browser window open from your last little practice session, carry on from where you left off. If not, go through that again (it's all good practice!). Now click or tap the back button to go back to the previous page. And... then click or tap the forward button to go forward a page. Then follow a few other links (it doesn't matter which)... then practise going back a few pages, forward a few pages, etc.

Practice 2 – Refresh: The next bit to practise is the refresh button. Now unless you've got a webpage there that's not quite loaded right, it's a bit difficult to see what this does. But if you find a webpage that has adverts on it (e.g. news.sky.com/uk), refreshing the page will reload the adverts too, and it'll usually change to a different one. Try it now, either with the Sky News website or another one that has adverts on the top or sides.

Practice 3 – Home: And finally, from whatever website you were last on, click or tap on the Home button (if you have one), and it should take you to whichever webpage is set as your Home page.

Zooming in and out

Some webpages are nice and clear and it’s easy to read everything on the page.  But unfortunately some aren’t – and there can be lots of reasons for that. But if for whatever reason you’re struggling to see what’s on the page, you can zoom in, and it’s just a bit like having a magnifying glass for reading the small print.

Likewise, sometimes there’ll be a big picture on a webpage that you can’t see all of because your screen’s too small – in those situations it’s handy to be able to zoom out.

There are three different ways you can zoom in and out, and that’s what I’ll cover in this video. Click or tap it to watch.

Practice: Open a webpage, any webpage (you can use helpfulbooks.co.uk if you want an easy example). Try out each of the zooming methods in turn: zoom in, then zoom out again. When you're happy you can do one method, try the next method. Have a think about which is your favourite way of zooming, and practise that one again, just to make sure.

Tabs

I use tabs a lot when I’m browsing the web.  They’re a way of keeping lots of different webpages open at the same time, so that you can flick between them if you’re comparing things, or just keep something there to refer to while you’re looking at other websites.

Or just if you’re in the middle of looking up how to get to East Midlands Airport on one website, but decide you want to check the football scores on another.  You can leave the first tab open and open a new one for the football scores.

This video shows you how to use tabs in Edge, including how to switch between them, close them, etc. Click or tap on it to watch.

Practice: In Edge, open up helpfulbooks.co.uk. Right-click on the "Our Products" link and choose "Open link in new tab". Then up at the top, click on the new tab that's opened, to see the range of books. Right-click on one of the book covers, and again choose "Open link in new tab". Up at the top, click again on the new tab that's opened, and you'll see details about that book. And then click back on the original tab, which should still show the Helpful Books home page. Finally, close the two new tabs.

So that’s all about the basics of using Edge to browse the web.  You might already have known some of that, but I hope you found it useful.

There aren't any specific questions for this lesson, but why not go through this checklist and make sure you're happy with everything:

• I can use the "back" and "forward" buttons.
• I know what the "home" and "refresh" buttons do and where to find them.
• I can zoom in and out to my heart's content.
• I can open a link in a new tab.
• I'm happy switching between tabs, closing tabs and using the "mute tab" feature.

That's the end of the sample lessons - I hope you enjoyed them.

If you'd like to find out all about the courses click on any of the links below to read more and enrol.

• Smartphones Made Simple
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