Well done! You've successfully followed your first link (well, the first time you've knowingly followed one anyway!). If you look up at the address bar, you'll notice that where previously it read "tutorial2.htm" at the end, it now says something like "tutorial3.htm". What it says doesn't really matter, but what's important to remember is why it's changed.

Lets use an analogy. If you were going to visit a friend you hadn't seen for ages and they'd recently moved house, you'd have to get their address from them before you went to visit. And because every address in the world is different from every other in at least one way, you'd be pretty confident that if you arrived and the number, street name, town etc. all matched up to the details your friend had supplied, you'd be in the right place. Well, the internet is exactly the same. Every page has it's own unique address so that any computer anywhere in the world can find it. All the computer needs is the correct address (sometimes called the URL or Universal Resource Location) typed into it and off it will go to collect all the information on that page. The bad news is that URL's tend to look like a load of gobbldegook, full of www.'s and http://'s, but don't worry - you hardly ever have to type one out.

Returning to the analogy, imagine that whilst your friend is giving you there address over the phone the line gets cut off. If you only have part of the address, you're going to struggle to get there, even if it's only the house number you haven't got. Again, the internet is identical in this respect. If you make a tiny mistake in the address or if you haven't quite got the right information, chances are that the computer will struggle to find the correct place. Again though, this is usually nothing more than mildly irritating as you very rarely have to type in a specific URL (just think of it as an address).

Right then, enough talking, lets do some more practice! So far you've followed two different types of link, one a button (actually just a small graphic of a button) and one a short phrase, which was coloured and underlined. Well, these are just two types of link. Links can be words, graphics, photos, or one particular area of a big image (called a hotspot). Anyway, our next link is the photo below, so click it to go to the next part of our tutorial...

Click on the picture!

If you're learning about the forward and backward toolbar buttons at this point in the tutorial, press the forward button now! (if you've not seen this bit of text or don't know about forward or backward buttons, just carry on reading the next paragraph).

Hello again! As you can see, links are quite flexible and can be all sorts of different things, so don't be scared to click in lots of different places as you move around the internet. Oh, and just in case you were wondering why the address bar didn't change after you clicked on that last link, that was because it was an internal link. Links don't actually have to be to other pages, they can also take you to a different part of the same page. If you want to see where you were, grab the scroll bar at the far right hand side of this page and move it upwards, or click the up arrow at the top of the bar a few times. Eventually the picture will come into view, along with the text that preceded it. Just click on it again to return here.

We've used this technique of internal links in several of our own web pages in this site (the OFSTED report page is a good example). It makes navigating a large document easy to do, so it's fairly widespread around the internet. Anyway, time for our next section, so follow me!