Finding Information
Look on the perimeter of the page for About Us, Philosophy, Biography to determine who the author is and determine why they are qualified to write about the topic.
Look for a last updated date, usually at the bottom of the page. Be careful, if it is today's date, it may be automatically generated.
Where did the author get the information? As in published scholarly/academic journals and books, you should expect documentation. This is no less true then if you were looking in a book or magazine.
Do the links work? Does the page only link to itself? Some pages have many links that work, but only link to other parts of the page.
Is there a reason there are not links to the original source if it is online (instead of reproducing it)? This may be an opportunity to only provide part of the story. Think of this as the movie advertiser trick. You see I WAS AWESTRUCK, the reviewer actually wrote "I was awestruck by how awful this was." This may require a bit more research to determine.
Do the links (or absence of other viewpoints) indicate a bias? How does the website look? A bias may not make a website unusable, but it is good to be aware of a bias.
Understanding the URL: Uniform Resource Locators - What can a web address tell us?
You don't have to be an expert in html to find out information from the web address itself. While this generally will not provide enough information to evaluate the web site as a whole, it can help you in figuring out where the web site is coming from and give you a better general understanding of how the information on the world wide web is distributed.
The first part of a web address is the Transfer Protocol - this essentially tells your browser (what you are viewing the internet through) what format the web page is in. Often you will see this expressed as: http: -- meaning that the page is in hypertext.
The second part is the server name, essentially this where the information is coming from. www.montclair.
After the server name comes the domain -- .com; .edu; .gov; .org. While this can still be useful in determining if a site is from a university (.edu) or government (.gov), (.org) and (.net) are no longer really any different then (.com).
Following the domain comes the directories and subdirectories. A / separates these. They are very similar to the folders that people store information in on their computers.
The final piece is the Filename.filetype. This is the name of the file that you are looking at and what type of document it is.
