My browser says website is not available…

We all have favorite websites that we often visit, and the modern browser versions from Internet Explorer (IE), Chrome, Firefox, etc all help with this.  One of the ways they help is by maintaining a list of recently visited web sites that match whatever you may be typing in the address bar. 

Notice in the example to the right that when I started to type “travelingmydeeperdream.com” the browser address bar automatically filled in suggestions from previous visits to the site.  I only had to type “tra” and the suggestions were already found for me.

This normally works great and is a nice timesaving shortcut. However, there are times when the browser gets confused and will come up with a message similar to “website is not available…” when you select one of the suggested address links.  So why does this happen?  Well, generally what happens is that the browser saves a “pointer” to the web address for every suggestion.  But sometimes (can often happen when you are traveling) the true address that the internet knows changes.  So when you use the shortcut the address that the shortcut uses is unknown by the internet in the area that you are at (that’s not technically correct, but it gets the idea across.)

The solution for this is to not accept the suggested site, but to rather continue typing out the full address of the site you are trying to reach.  In my example I would type the full address of traveingmydeeperdream.com into the browsers address bar, and then press enter or go.  By doing this you are telling the browser to go out to the internet and resolve that address (rather than rely upon a saved shortcut); it refreshes the shortcut.