- 1). Determine the author of the website. If the page you are citing is an article, the author's name may be directly under or above the title. Sometimes, however, the site is not authored by a single person but rather by an organization; in that case, use the name of the organization as the author of the site. To make sure you cite the full, correct name of the organization, search for an "About" page, which usually explains who created the website. Use the name of the author, whether person or organization, as the first part of the citation.
- 2). Write down the title of the site. If you're referencing a certain part of a site (rather than the homepage), the title may be the name of a specific article or page, such as "How to Make a Citation of a Website" or "About the Company." If you are citing a website in its entirety, write the name of the website itself. The title is usually located near the top of the page, under any drop-down menus but above the primary text, and it is usually in bold or large lettering. You may need to italicize the title or enclose it in quotation marks, depending on the style format you are following.
- 3). Determine the publisher of the site. Usually you can find this by clicking on the site's "Home" page, examining the main part of the URL or searching the site's "About" page for more detailed information. If the author is a person, the publisher might be an organization that manages the website. If the author is an organization, that organization might also be the publisher; sometimes, however, a larger or higher organization is the actual publisher. For example, the website for the National Institutes of Health is published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
- 4). Include the website's date of publication. If you are citing a specific article, the publication date may be immediately under or above the title, near the author. The dates of some websites or pages are much more difficult to locate, but they are almost always present. Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for a year or date. If there are multiple dates, use the most recent one. If you have trouble finding it, search the page for the words "updated," "posted," or "published"; this will usually bring you to a small bit of text at the bottom, such as "Last updated June 2009."
- 5). Record the date you accessed the website. This step is perhaps the easiest because you do not need to find it in the source; you simply write the current day, month, and year. This is called the access date or the retrieval date, and it is important because websites change. If the site or page changes after you read it, your research won't be compromised as long as you cite the day that you last looked at it.
- 6). Cite the URL of the website. You may know the URL as the link, hyperlink, or site address; it is what you enter into your browser to visit that website (for example, http://www.ehow.com/). Copy and paste the URL directly to ensure accuracy. If the URL is so long that it takes up more than one line of text, make sure the line break occurs after a dash ( / ). The URL should not be hyperlinked; it should appear as plain text---black, and not underlined.
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