The Stack Exchange User Guide/The Home Page
To begin, open your browser and navigate to https://stackoverflow.com/.
The page contains quite a bit of information and can be a little overwhelming at first glance, so we'll begin by learning what each of the elements on the page is for individually.
The Top Bar
[edit | edit source]We will begin by examining the bar at the top of the screen:
On the left is a link to the StackExchange homepage. On the right is a set of links and the searchbox. The links present in the topbar provide access to other sites related to StackOverflow, the login page, and information about StackOverflow. When you are logged in, this page will also contain a link to your profile page.
The Question Bar
[edit | edit source]The question bar contains links to the various pages available on the site:
The questions page is the page displayed when you bring up the home page. The tags page consists of the most popular tags that questions are tagged with. The users page contains a list of users sorted by their reputation. The badges page contains a list of all badges that can be earned (except for tag badges). The unanswered page contains a list of all unanswered questions. Finally, the ask question link takes you to a page where you can ask a question on the site.
The Question List
[edit | edit source]The majority of the content on the page consists of the list of recent questions. The list is sorted by most recently modified questions. Here is an example question:
From the information visible here, we can see that the question was viewed 5 times, has 0 answers, and has 0 votes. It was asked by a user named "Darko Z" and was last modified 3 seconds ago. It has 3 tags: "asp.net", "iis7", and "iis-7.5". Clicking the title of the question will take you to the question's page.